The past two years have seen no less than three different cinema adaptations of novels by Henry James: Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady (1997), Agniezska Holland’s Washington Square (1997) and Iain Softley’s Wings of a Dove (1998).

In Portrait Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman) refuses a rich suitor in order to follow a romantic concept of “grand love”; instead, she marries the cold and egotistical Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich), a man who seems to be constantly short of money. Not listening to numerous warnings, Isabel makes the mistake of her life. When she is finally able to confess that fact to herself, she decides to stay with her husband, thus accepting marriage as martyrdom. In Washington Square Catherine Sloper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) falls for Morris Townsend (Ben Chaplin) who has gambled his entire fortune away. Mr. Sloper looks through Townsend’s real intentions; he warns his daughter that her suitor is only after her money. When Catherine insists on marrying him, she is threatend with disinheritance; as a result, Townsend gradually withdraws from her. Realizing his true intentions, Catherine decides to devote her life to the concept of charity. In The Wings Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter), daughter of a morally and financially bankrupt Londoner, is raised by her aunt Mrs. Lowder (Vanessa Redgrave) who has promised Kate her fortune if she marries into nobility. Kate, however, is in love with a penniless journalist called Merton Densher (Linus Roache); the two get engaged in secrecy. Being unable to give up her promised fortune, Kate convinces Merton to seduce the fatally ill Milly Theale (Alison Elliot) who is supposed to be quite wealthy. Knowing Milly’s character fairly well, Kate calculates that Millie might leave her money to Merton. For that reason Merton accompanies both women on a (highly scenic) trip to Venice where he makes love to Millie who gradually regains strength. Kate, however, feels more and more jealous; finally she decides to act against her own plan by disclosing the secret of her engagement. Millie feels totally deceived and soon fades away, nevertheless leaving her fortune to Merton. Merton challenges Kate by making her choose between him and the money he has inherited. Still being unable to decide, Kate gives up both.

All three film plots have one common denominator: they focus on the psychological development of a woman. Moreover, they present love as hopelessly entangled with the concepts of money and fortune, an aspect of Henry James’s novels that seems to be extremely modern. James was no longer able to believe that love and money should either go together effortlessly or should not be mixed at all; he was essentially an anti-romantic writer who seems to have anticipated a key experience of our modern world. This element comes across especially well in Catherine Sloper’s fate; disappointed and crushed both by her father’s and her lover’s inability to separate love and money, she decides to walk a totally solitary road in life. Whereas Jennifer Jason Leigh’s portrayal of Catherine’s character clearly renders a sense of psychological growth, Nicole Kidman (in Portrait) fails just in that regard; her performance does not generate any idea of development. Instead, Kidman is totally overpowered by the physical presence John Malkovich who manages to turn Osmond’s character into a portrayal of stunning complexity. 100% calculating, totally cold and a superb role player, Osmond seems to have escaped from a Shakespeare drama. In one of the film’s best moments, the seduction scene, he sinks down on Isabel like a greedy insect. A little bit later the gates of Isabel’s Roman palace close behind her like the mighty wings of a coffin.

It is in scenes like this that Jane Campion’s adaptation reveals its superiority, as only her film makes some attempts to transfer Henry James’s metaphorical prose into a visual language of its own. Nevertheless, all movie versions of Henry James’s novels fail in one principal aspect. Not even a superior adaptation such as the classical Ivory/Merchant production of The Bostonians (1984) manages to find a visual equivalent of James’s stylistic innovation, the famous “style indirect libre” which implies that the fictional world is entirely seen/filtered through the mind of a character. This is all the more surprising since a far more difficult technique such as the famous “stream of consciousness” has been translated fairly well into a visual mode of expression, for example in Marleen Gorris’s adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway (1997). Henry James, however, has been filmed entirely for his plots; for that reason even the best adaptations have a tendency of turning into yet another Wings of a Dove ; into a film which comes dangerously close to a pleasant “photo novel.”