'Auteur' torture: Campion's forbidding 'Portrait'

By Larry Switzky

Flipping through a movie magazine with a friend during break, I was struck by the poster for Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady: a wraithlike bodice trapped by a masculine hand, in stylish black and white. My friend grimaced, saying, "That's the kind of thing your English teacher would make you go see to pick out all the symbolism."

And, to some extent, she was right. Apart from all the soul-searching, repressed Victorian sexuality, and understated performances in the Merchant Ivory tradition, the real polemic in Portrait is not the battle between self and society or happiness and intellect, but whether or not "high art" alone can sustain an entire movie. One of the great dangers of auteur-ship is that the genius and careful eye of a director can overwhelm the characters in a film, denying them life under piles of artifice, camera tricks, and morose lighting--a danger proved very real in Portrait, and averted only by occasional visual triumphs.

Campion's talents seem to gravitate towards simple, lyrical period pieces like The Piano, where there aren't a lot of characters or plot complications to get in the way of the beautiful scenery and talented actors. Portrait, unfortunately, has quite a few characters, lots of moving around Europe, and much subtlety of emotion. The self-conscious artistry gets in the way of what is a potentially mature and insightful character study. Likewise, the movie serves as an answer to the fluffy dreaminess of recent nineteenth-century confections like Sense and Sensibility, countering beautiful English countrysides with sterile manor walls and bright lighting with nightmarish blackness, but not simplistic and endearing characters with complex and fascinating ones. At times, Portrait is a gripping movie, but rarely an enjoyable one.

Since the story is by Henry James, the theme is evident: Americans coming to Europe and attempting to acquire "culture"-- usually through money. In Portrait, the American in question is Isabel Archer, played severely and impenetrably by Nicole Kidman (out to redeem herself after pop fare like Batman Forever and in anticipation of working with another auteur, Stanley Kubrick, in the upcoming Eyes Wide Shut). Isabel is set to marry any of a number of willing bachelors, but [[sterling]]70,000 from her dead uncle (John Gielgud), her suspicion that there is more to the world than being a responsible English wife, and the advice of the devious Madame Merle (played by Barbara Hershey, possibly the only actress in the movie who has any fun with her role), convince her to set off for Florence.

There she pouts, cries, and marries Gilbert Osmond, whom John Malkovich plays as a dictionary definition of "bourgeois," "decadent," or "dilettante"--and with nearly as much soul. His Osmond is an aesthete who collects objets d'art as he collects people, and although he is often meant to inspire sympathy or hatred in the audience, my reaction was mostly irritation at his overstated underacting. His most effective scene isn't really acting at all, but visual trickery; imitatingVertigo, he twirls a striped umbrella around in circles as an indifferent mesmerist. In a realm of Gothic fixtures, ruined lives, and lighting that, when not obscuring everything in the scene, cries out "dark night of the soul," his passive-aggressive, calculatingly logical painter is neither villainous nor particularly interesting.

It may not, however, be Malkovich's fault, as he, like everyone else, is upstaged by the real star of the show-- Jane Campion. This is not always a bad thing, since Campion's eye for framing scenes and camera work is extraordinary, unlike anything in the American cinema or even some of the best still photography. Scenes of Italian piazzas are terrifying and ancient; shadows of corseted women as they bustle through busy marketplaces are both strange and beautiful; the excitement of a street party in London is mimicked by the rainbow of lights behind it. In what may be the film's visual triumph, a ballroom dance is subdued from its pastel splendor into a world of beiges and tans, like the boredom and helplessness of Isabel's bleak existence.

Unfortunately, Campion forgets to put real people into her lush vistas; the characters, like the shadows of which she is so fond, are only shades of characters-- which can be appropriate artistically, but not for a woman with as much emotional depth as Isabel. Campion predominantly dresses her actors in black and white, not only to indicate their simplistic views of each other, but her own opinion of them as well. The fact that the clipped, "profound" wordplay between the characters often sounds like a Calvin Klein Eternity ad doesn't help with character believability.

Campion's surreal set pieces also come off as forcibly avant-garde, particularly since their tenor isn't sustained throughout the rest of the movie; they don't flow naturally into the tone and narrative, but are intrusions of in-your-face artistry. The idea of Isabel's hasty and pointless trip around Europe as a black-and-white newsreel is clever, but descends into banal profundity when a naked woman drifts across the screen and beans in a dish start clamoring "I love you." Entertainment Weekly even made fun of Campion's overt artistry in this week's issue, which cites over 60 uses of "finger imagery," including the middle finger on which the title of the movie is written in the pretentiously-nonsensical opening sequence.

On the Web site for Portrait of a Lady, Campion calls it her most difficult film yet, with "a major scene every day." Perhaps if she had allowed for smaller, actor-driven scenes, the movie would have packed more than simply a visual punch. As it stands, Portrait is a museum piece, not an organic film: elegant, eminently professional, and mostly lacking in life.

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