Word: mertonism
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...aunt who wants her to marry well. Into the midst of this crisis sails Milly Theale (Alison Elliott), an ingenuous American visitor who--in true Jamesian form--happens to be encumbered with an enormous fortune. Milly becomes friends with Kate, but also falls in love with Kate's fiance, Merton Densher, not knowing of the clandestine relationship. She invites him to come with her and Kate to Venice, and he does so--at Kate's urging. For Kate, having learned that Milly is fatally ill, sees in the dying girl a chance for their own happiness...
...film focuses exclusively on this triangle, somewhat at the expense of the supporting figures. Kate's aunt Maude, Susan, Milly's chaperone and caretaker, and Lord Mark, Merton's rival, such pivotal and richly complex characters in the original novel, are here reduced to merely functional roles. Fortunately, the three principal players have more than enough presence to command one's entire attention, and Softley's cinematic style--heavy on facial close-up shots, the only method by which he attempts to reproduce James's constant psychological probing of his characters--plays off every shade of expression in their looks...
...because of the genuine erotic chemistry between Bonham-Carter and Roache, which reaches its peak at the Venice Carnival (a script addition), only to disappear completely in the one explicit sex scene (definitely a script addition), which Softley deliberately deeroticizes to show the gulf that opens between Kate and Merton. Both the sexualized metaphor of the masked carnival and the loveless sex may strike one as a bit heavy-handed, but both sequences are effective thanks to the remarkable capacity of the two actors to turn the heat on and off at will...
From Forster to James might be just a move from one Eaton Square town house to another. When The Wings of the Dove was offered, she thought, "Oh, not another costume drama--and in the period that I've done to death." True, but Kate, who prods her lover Merton to woo dying American heiress Millie Theale (Alison Elliott), is a more complex lady of breeding. She and Merton recall two other devious Europeans, also out to fleece a rich American girl, in James' The Portrait of a Lady. Here, though, the best role and much of the rooting interest...
...good at being impulsive," Kate says. She needs time to spin her webs around those, like Maude and Mark, who would entrap her. She is good at duplicity--so good it becomes a habit. Thus she works it on Merton, the sort of weak, handsome man strong women are attracted to and know how to use. Millie, with one of those wilting diseases peculiar to heroines of romantic novels, has no such guile. Imperiled innocence is her lure for Merton, and it may draw him beyond the reach of Kate's conniving...