recommended

Purely Joyful Movie!

Lack of good storyline.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This is a very interesting film, there is for sure a hint of sexual repression in it, but I think that's true of all of the Director (Campion's) films. Given the script, Nicole Kidman has a standout performance, I just think that the director didn't get the absolute best out of her, with her character somewhat lacking in belief. Her character just doesn't seem as believable as she could. Perhaps this is because the Director didn't allow enough time for Kidman's character to evolve from an innocent to a cold corrupted woman.Its for this lack of character development I felt I couldn't give the film more than a 6. There is just something lacking - almost chopped out of the film. a simple 3 years later isn't good enough explanation for such a dramatic change in character. In addition I feel there is no formal ending to the story. The production and cinematography give this film a higher rating that it might of otherwise got.Not bad but could have been better.

I've repeatedly seen this movie, I simply can't help myself from watching this example of good taste that has the ideas, the feeling, the meanings and also the means of a work of art. This movie is simply adorable from the beginning to the end. The actors, the story, the costumes, the soundtrack, scenery, everything is beautiful and full of authenticity. The adaptation from the novel appropriately reveals the subtle, simple and total story about life and mistakes, not only about women, but an extension about choosing wrong and about chances of choosing again, of hoping. But hoping itself is a choice, we all have the choice of hoping or not. This category is called "sublime" in art I guess...

Spoilers throughout Most of the acting is fine. But I had a problem with the later Kidman scenes. Kidman needed less of the weeping and more anger or deviousness, to keep herself away from her vile husband as much as possible. Instead she is a typical victim, inviting his spite and weeping when he exerts it. She even lets the thug hit her.Clearly Isabel was heading for a fall right from the start of the story. She's quite convinced there's no point in marrying her decent suitor Goodwood, she wants as people often do to live it up for some years before marriage. Unfortunately, she isn't nearly as clever as she thinks she is and it's not long before she's met the devious Merle and has been hoodwinked into marriage with Merle's vile lover Osmond so that the pair of them can live on Isabel's money.Standard Henry James type of theme. American girls take people at face value but expect value for money. Europeans are devious and will say/do anything to get an American heiress's money as they are always had up but want to live the high life. Isabel is naive - totally fooled by Osmond's pretence to be an aesthete. Osmond is a self-satisfied, conceited, totally self-centred and selfish jerk who thinks he's a wonderful and admirable aesthete whom everyone should admire but we audience see through him right from the start. Even his long-time mistress and mother of the child Pansy, Merle, is deceived by him until he finally, at the end, tells her he never cared about her either and she realises she has wasted her life on him and suffered from having to hide the true identity of her child for nothing.Osmond's method is the well-known "Whatever happens it's always your fault, I am perfect and blameless, I am a saint and you are selfish/thoughtless/stupid/venomous/a liar/hiding the truth/whatever along with the ruthless Victorian head of the family you do as I say nonsense that women had to put up with in that period. The jaw dropping thing is that Isabel becomes totally witless - seems to believe all this drivel from her vicious husband and begs his forgiveness every time. She becomes aware gradually that he is being unfair but hasn't the guts to tell him so to his face and then walk out - it would be difficult but perfectly possible for her to have fled with her American lover Goodwood who is at his wits end why it is she won't be with him even though clearly she has feelings for him.Osmond's daughter falls for "the wrong man". Isabel tries to help Pansy, by helping to deter the suitor her father wants, but Osmond soon finds out, accuses his wife of being treacherous and sends his daughter to a convent to "think about her errors and her future". Pansy proves to be like her father - treacherous. She tells Isabel dismissively, "I have learned that I must always obey my father." So much for Isabel trying to help the girl to be with the man who loved her - Pansy is revealed as shallow like her parents. Isabel is a fool - she has allowed herself to be brainwashed by a jerk because she thought he was glamorous (though anyone less glamorous than this Osmond would be hard to find, I disliked him on sight, quite correctly). Isabel's kindly cousin Ralph has the sadly not unusual consumption, and now is dying and Isabel goes to him in England in spite of her husband refusing to believe Ralph was that ill, ie a means to again force his wife to his own bidding through trading on her loyalty. But Isabel is more loyal to Ralph and goes to him.Ralph dies. Goodwood is there and at last we think it is his time. Can Isabel is well away from her Florence-based husband. She can now go back to the USA with devoted Goodwood? In an outdoor scene, she finally makes clear she now loves Goodwood and kisses him, but then she runs away from him back into the house. The movie ends with her standing at the door of the house looking towards the camera. You can't tell for sure what she'll do next but there's a feeling of foreboding.Beats me why the movie didn't finish the story. Goodwood calls next day only to discover that Isabel has gone straight back to her husband. We are told her friend who has been Ralph's companion has "taught Goodwood how to wait". How long, the reader wonders? Presumably until Osmond dies, but that man I would suspect will outlive everyone and Isabel will never leave him because if she did, she'd betray her own original conceit that she wanted to live an exciting and meaningful life. Basically, Isabel is a silly, self-destructive woman. She could never make any man happy. She needs, it seems, to be bullied.

No one can accuse Jane Campion of lack of ambition in bringing Henry James' novel to the screen, but her film is a total disaster.The audacious style that made "The Piano" so compelling and memorable is a Frankenstein's monster here, and it runs away with Campion's film. The result is incomprehensible. Actors are stranded walking around opulent sets saying lines, while Campion pulls out every trick in the book to confounding effect.Though the fact that the film is incoherent probably means that it's a good adaptation, since it was after all based on a novel by Henry James....Grade: F