Word: softley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...easiest book to translate into film," says director Iain Softley of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. Ring one up for the classic literary under-statement of the year. The notoriously dense late-Jamesian style, elliptical dialogue, and near-obsessive concentration on internal thoughts and consciousness guarantee an uphill battle in achieving upper-end-mainstream/borderline elite moviegoer appeal. Softley and screen-writer Hossein Amini have succeeded in crafting an intensely physical adaptation that takes enough sweeping liberties and simplifications to make James scholars cringe or shrug, but retains sufficient subtlety and sensitivity to be dramatically compelling...
...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 and gestures...
...marginalization of the older generation in Softley's film appears to have been a deliberate choice. Softley, who previously directed the youth-centered, youth-targeted films Backbeat (chronicling the Beatle who dropped out) and Hackers, makes no bones about adapting The Wings of the Dove for the same age sector: "There was the danger that an audience, though about the same age as these characters, would feel alienated [from them]...I wanted to make something that would appeal to them...
...film's overt eroticism, which constitutes the boldest and most potentially controversial reworking of the text. In James, the eroticism is so finely distilled that it breaks through to the surface only fleetingly, and then restricted almost entirely to the violence of suggestion and language rather than action. Softley's contemporized approach works 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...
...scenes in Venice are lovely to look at and lovingly filmed: Softley admits that the prospect of shooting in that city was one of the most enticing aspects of the project. Again, his cinematic imagery, without being particularly inventive, has a certain visceral power: a walk through a fish-market, capturing a weird, peculiarly nauseating kind of carnality, serves to underscore Milly's physical fragility; the sunlight and warm, golden-tinted colors of Venice give way to driving rain and bleak grayness as Milly's impending discovery of Kate's and Merton's treachery looms near. To complete the contrast...