Leaden
bowl
The Golden Bowl, dir. James Ivory. Here's Merchant/Ivory adapting Henry James again. This time it's The Golden Bowl and it's about a love quadrangle with three Americans and one Italian in Edwardian England (plus a dash of romantic Rome). Adam Verver (Nick Nolte) is a super-rich art collector. Adam's daughter, Maggie (Kate Beckinsale), is married to Amerigo, a dashing, penniless Italian prince who's got the hots for Maggie's impoverished best friend Charlotte, with whom he was entangled before the need for serious wealth struck home.
Steamy Charlotte (Uma Thurman, right, permanently on the boil) doesn't
want to stop and fortunately contrives both close proximity and luxury
by marrying widow Dad. For most of the film, Adam and Maggie seem oblivious
to the screamingly obvious, largely because they have this deep father/daughter
thing that Ziggy Freud would have been delighted to explore. Will the
penny drop and what will happen to the serious bucks if it does? Should
Amerigo really heed Adam's dark hints of violence against anyone
harming Maggie? Does Amerigo really love Maggie as well as her fortune
in spite of his lusty frolics with Charlotte? And will Adam forsake cultured
Europe for the crudities of America, taking his treasures and his sulky
wife with him to exhibit (both) in a huge purpose-built art museum?
Who cares? Perhaps only the ghost of Henry James cuddling his psychological complexities in heaven and wondering why none of them made it into the plot. Several good actors waste their time on this decorative trifle and most give as good as they can, though the role of Amerigo is stereotyped beyond Jeremy Northam's powers of redemption.
There are the usual Merchant/Ivory servings of lush period buildings, interiors, paintings and scenery, and the usual fascination with the idle rich, but my overwhelming impression at the end was relief that the world so devotionally portrayed here has gone forever.
- Tony Coady
Well-spelled
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, dir. Chris Columbus. It is quite possible that by the time this review is read there will be a fashion for Potter-fatigue. A week after the movie's release the Melbourne Herald Sun sported the question, 'Are we tired of Harry yet?' After profiting mightily, one imagines, from the sale of Potter albums and running endless hype-features on the film, the Hun gave notice that it will soon want to be on the side of the naysayers too. The essential unfairness of that should be apparent to any of the children who still revel in the book and this film. The fact is, children love repetition of good things, from pat-a-cake games to stories and songs. What is tiring is the avalanche of peripherals that has accompanied the Potter hype. To be tired of Potter hype isn't the same as being tired of the books or the film, which will stand as children's classics beside Narnia, the Faraway Tree and hobbit-stuff, bearing repetition in the way only such classics can.
The film, perhaps the most faithful rendition of a novel since To Kill a Mockingbird and the most eagerly awaited since Gone with the Wind, has done all it should have done. Columbus has managed to convey the magic, the quirkiness and the visual richness of the book in 150 minutes, which is pretty good going. In one interview he says that he and Joanne Rowling (the book's author) had agreed that it would have taken seven hours to put absolutely everything in. But the compromises are decent ones, and the non-compromises are a triumph.
The look is enchanting: soaring aerial shots, various castles and cathedrals making a perfect Hogwarts. The actors (Daniel Radcliffe as Harry, Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley) are all a reasonable Potter-fan could want. Emma Watson as Hermione is smaller and rather more pert than I imagined her, but delivers the lines with perfect understanding. Robbie Coltrane, the only possible Hagrid. Maggie Smith, the only possible Professor McGonagall. Alan Rickman, perhaps not nasty enough as Snape.
The film is really the first Potter book, done in faithful short scenes. Nothing is added: Harry, orphaned when his wizard-parents are murdered by the evil sorcerer Voldemort, is sent to live with the Dursleys, his pusillanimous aunt and uncle, loathers of anything to do with magic. So while their son Dudley is indulged to ruination, Harry is relegated to the cupboard below the stairs and half-starved. Columbus evokes the Dursleys' lower-middle-class narrowness with awful decor, and dresses them with a fearful respectable dullness: they could have stepped from an English Women's Weekly of the early '60s.
Harry, of course, is not forgotten by the wizarding world: in surviving the death-spell that killed his parents he has broken Voldemort's power. When the time comes for him to go to secondary school, Hogwarts, the wizards' boarding school, sends for him.
The film's designers evoke Hogwarts in fine style: Escher-like staircases, echoing halls, mysterious passages, forbidden areas. John Cleese has a too-brief cameo as Nearly Headless Nick, a partially decapitated ghost. Julie Walters gets another short stint as the mother of the large and hopeful clan of Weasleys - not for the first time recalling Dickens: just as there is a David Copperfieldish, Oliver Twistish feel to Harry, the Weasleys are very Micawberish.
Harry Potter is a classic boarding-school story, with wizardry added. What sets the books apart from ordinary fantasy or school stories is the eccentricity, the solidity of the world conjured, and the small, rich ironies that underpin everything. The highlight of the film is the Quidditch game, where players zoom around on broomsticks to play a kind of fiendish aerial lacrosse.
If the joyful queues were anything to go by, expectations were high, and
in the session I attended, not one child seemed bored, tired or anything
but happily worn out at the end. All the red lollies and Coke in the theatre
couldn't break their attention spans for this one. Roll on the sequels.
- Juliette Hughes
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