November 14, 1997 | Arriving in the wake of Jane Campion’s wrong-headed Portrait of a Lady and Agnieszka Holland’s heavy-handed Washington Square, Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove is all the more welcome as an inspired adaptation of a Henry James novel. In fact, you would have to go back to Francois Truffaut’s The Green Room (1978) — loosely based on two James short stories, “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Altar of the Dead” — to find a comparably eloquent cinematic rendering of the author’s style and substance.
Set in the familiar Jamesian territory of status-obsessed, early 20th-century Europe, Wings of the Dove is, at heart, a romantic triangle. Kate Croy, played by Helena Bonham Carter, is a bright young woman who fancies herself a free spirit. But she is too practical, or perhaps too weak, to abandon the accouterments of a London lifestyle she can enjoy only as long as she remains the ward of her wealthy Aunt Maude (Charlotte Rampling). Kate loves Merton Densher (Linus Roache), a penniless journalist who claims he doesn’t believe in anything, not even his own muckraking. Aunt Maude doesn’t approve, of course, and threatens to disown Kate — and Kate’s wastrel father (Michael Gambon) — if her niece doesn’t end this unseemly affair. Reluctantly admitting she is “no good at being impulsive,” Kate bows to her aunt’s demands. For a while.
Enter Millie Theale (Alison Elliott of The Spitfire Grill), a visiting American known widely as “the world’s richest orphan.” As Kate befriends Millie, she discovers the beautiful and seemingly vibrant young heiress is dying of an unnamed disease. Just as important, she also discovers Millie has developed a crush on Merton. Very quickly, she plots to put this knowledge to profitable use.
Kate accepts an invitation to join Millie and the heiress’ traveling companion (Elizabeth McGovern) for an extended vacation in Europe. Once there, however, she invites Merton to join them, then arranges to draw him ever closer to the lovestruck American. At first, Merton is amused and confused. Kate waits for the proper moment when she’s alone with her sweetheart, and places her cards on the table: He should marry Millie, and become a rich widower, so they can live happily ever after. Merton is shocked, then outraged. But he isn’t entirely unreceptive to the proposal.
Even as they remain faithful to the broad outlines of James’ novel, director Iain Softley (Backbeat, Hackers) and screenwriter Hossein Amini (Jude) subtly infuse the source material with a modern sensibility. They have updated the story slightly, moving it from 1902 to 1910, a difference that allows the characters a bit more freedom from the restrictions of Victorian propriety. (Women are starting to smoke cigarettes and speak their minds, much to the distress of disapproving traditionalists.) In this version, the events unfold during the dawn of a new moral relativism. As a result, Kate’s machinations seem less like self-absorbed treachery and more like steely-eyed pragmatism.
The character’s meanings and motivations are made all the more ambiguous by Helena Bonham Carter’s intriguingly enigmatic performance. More of a clear-cut villainess in James’ original, Kate emerges here as a more complicated, more vulnerable individual.
There is every indication that, at least in some corner of her heart, Kate is genuinely fond of Millie, and wants her dying friend to experience the joy of love in her final days. Naturally, Kate means to benefit from Millie’s happiness. And, just as naturally, she subverts her own grand plans when she realizes she may have been too successful in her matchmaking. But Carter makes us aware that Kate likely suffers far more heartbreak than she causes.
Softley’s Wings of the Dove is far more sexually explicit than anything James ever wrote. Indeed, it’s far more explicit than any of the lush Merchant-Ivory period dramas that it often resembles. When Kate first tells Merton of her plans for their future happiness, they seal their compact with a sudden, almost angry coupling in a Venice alleyway. (The movie strongly implies that, for all their professed free-thinking, this is the first time they actually have intercourse.) Later, in a nude scene that is most shocking for what it reveals of their souls, Kate and Merton are forced to confront the full measure of what they have lost, what they can never regain.
And yet, as striking as these moments are, they do not linger in the mind as vividly as the quiet scenes when characters speak volumes about their repressed passions and dark suspicions with lingering gazes and pained expressions.
Carter is nothing short of remarkable, and much the same can be said of her co-stars. Linus Roache offers a vivid yet understated portrayal of a man whose cynicism is equaled only by his self-disgust, and who discovers — much to his shock, and far too late — that he is more of an idealist than he ever dreamed or desired. As Millie, the third partner in this romantic pas de trois, Alison Elliott is radiantly moving as she methodically upends our expectations and assumptions. Ultimately, Millie is the only one who wins in this game, because she alone has nothing to lose. And even though she fully understands that the prize may not be worthy of her, the dying heiress savors it without regret or recrimination.
