Washington Square
First screened and reviewed in October 1997 / Most recently screened in October 2011
Director: Agnieszka Holland. Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Albert Finney, Ben Chaplin, Maggie Smith, Judith Ivey, Sara Ruzicka, Jennifer Garner, Betsy Brantley, Arthur Laupus, Robert Stanton, Nancy Daly. Screenplay: Carol Doyle (from the novel by Henry James). Twitter Capsule:
Plays at first like a dodgy burlesquing of James, but tonal control sets in and Leigh gathers force as Catherine.
VOR:②
If you, say, teach "Henry James and Film" courses at a university, this movie matters a lot. But for anyone else, it's barely a ripple.
Ed. Jun 2014:My first review for my college paper! Today, even more than in most cases, I would write a very different review. But I enjoy preserving this one for archival purposes.
The central figure in Washington Square—or non-central figure, but we'll get to that—is Catherine Sloper, a plain but earnest young heiress whose need for love is trampled by her family's cruel neglect and her fiancé's weak will. Ironically, Henry James's story about a woman with no advocates has been one of his most enduringly popular works. Even more perversely, the role of humble, overlooked Catherine has become an award magnet for glamorous actresses, most famously in the case of Olivia de Havilland's Oscar-winning work in the 1949 film adaptation The Heiress.
William Wyler, the auteur behind The Heiress, was one of Hollywood's most notoriously tyrannical directors, and the revenge drama he cooked out of James's original recipe (filtered through Ruth and Augustus Goetz's famous stage adaptation)
reflected his own fascination with power and retribution. What immediately distinguishes Agnieszka Holland's new version of Washington Square, then, is its recentering of the power-politics in the story and, indeed, its remarkable and fruitful synergy of story and tellers.
For the first time on film, you see, Catherine's story is told by a director and an actress with whom she bears much in common. Both Holland and star Jennifer Jason Leigh have contributed years of solid, sometimes spectacular work to the male-dominated film industry but neither has received the critical or popular recognition they deserve. In their sensitive hands, Washington Square comes closer than did The Heiress to what James originally wrote: an elegy to a woman whom few people notice and no one loves, told to us by women who, at least professionally, can very nearly relate.
The film opens with a long, continuous shot that begins over the treeline of mid-19th-century lower Manhattan, swoops over avenues and paths in the park, and sneaks into an old brownstone where, in an upstairs bedroom, a woman dies while giving birth. Sustained opening shots can be empty gimmicks (anyone see The Birdcage?), but Jerzy Zielinski's vivid camerawork shifts moods so subtly in each new context that, within minutes, the various tonal textures of Old New York—from public decorum to private grief—are established.
Dr. Austin Sloper (Albert Finney), the man whose residence we have entered, is more
derailed by his wife's death than delighted by his daughter's birth. Named for her mother, and thus a constant reminder of Dr. Sloper's loss, Catherine (first Sara Ruzicka, then Leigh) grows up with little hope of connecting with her distant, resentful father. Worse, Austin's sister Lavinia (Maggie Smith) fancies herself a surrogate mother but is too uncouth and undisciplined to make of Catherine a sophisticated lady. "So this...magnificent creature is my child," laments Dr. Sloper,
beholding Catherine in a gaudy, ill-fitting gown before they and Lavinia leave for the requisite period-film fancy dress ball. Catherine is not the sharpest needle on the tree, but she can (and does) feel the sad, punishing facetiousness in her father's pronouncements.
She is, in fact, so conscious of her lack of "magnificence" that she is instantaneously suspicious of the attentions of Morris Townsend (Ben Chaplin). Morris has no money and a shady past, but all of New York acknowledges his rare good looks and, even rarer, his lively charm and sense of adventure. Dr. Sloper is so observant of (or is it threatened by?) Morris' cosmetic appeal that he can only explain the young suitor's attentions to Catherine as a fortune-hunting maneuver. "He must think she has 80,000 a year," the Doctor says. Which, as it happens, she does, but Catherine does not question his motives. She wagers all she has on the purity of Morris's love. Meanwhile, Morris himself begins a protracted, ugly rivalry with the skeptical Dr. Sloper. As Morris tells Catherine, "I stake my pride on proving to your father that he is wrong," perhaps failing to realize that his intended declaration of love has become a declaration of war. For his part, Dr. Sloper whisks Catherine off to Europe, primarily to distance Catherine from Morris, but also in pathetic pursuit of retracing Morris's globe-trotting footsteps, and maybe adducing some of his foreign-bred charm. The tragedy of Washington Square is that, by the end of the film, the only shadow of love that survives is the jealous, passionate admiration that exists between Morris and the doctor. Catherine has been erased from her own romance.
The decision to cast Leigh is a big risk with big payoffs. Most famous for playing hookers and addicts in films like Last Exit to Brooklyn and the hypnotic Georgia, Leigh's participation in a costume drama is an almost absurd proposition. The incongruities between her persona and the period, however, serve to reinforce the essential awkwardness Catherine Sloper feels in her own environment. The skittish, chameleon-like quality that has kept Leigh from being a star is perfectly suited to Catherine. In some scenes, her fiercely mannered playing—a personal style that has earned the actress as much derision as acclaim—is a logical underscoring of both the rigorously mannered society around her and her own, permanent discombobulation. In other scenes, though, Leigh becomes so still and tremulous that she almost disappears into the celluloid, nervously paralyzed until her misery and confusion are so credible and compelling they are almost uncomfortable to behold.
Chaplin, the Hugh Grant-ish twinkie from The Truth About Cats & Dogs, makes an
admirable about-face to become this brooding, swanky manipulator. As in that film,
however, he projects a wheezy lack of mystery—a bad move in a role once played by Montgomery Clift. Finney and Smith are convincing as always, but they show no new sides of their prodigious talents. Smith's Lavinia, in particular, is a near-transplant of her kooky chaperone from A Room With a View. Holland, whose previous credits include the German drama Europa, Europa and the kiddie-pleaser The Secret Garden, was smart to choose a tight, simple story that allows for a few idiosyncratic touches but matches well with her essential narrative
conservatism. Recently guilty of filling her films with too many climaxes, the director shows considerable discipline in building the tension between her characters until the drama naturally reaches its own critical mass.
Holland has little if any of the natural genius of a filmmaker like Jane Campion, and Washington Square has barely any of the daring or visual audacity of Campion's own James adaptation, last year's grievously ignored The Portrait of a Lady. At the same time, Holland's straightforward storytelling may give audiences more access into James than did Campion's almost frightening originality. If Washington Square is not necessarily groundbreaking, it does bear the marks of diligent artists lending their talents to strong material. Holland and Leigh are among the last two film artists on Earth who will ever be diagnosed with Lost World Syndrome: i.e., making the same movie over and over simply because they can. Neither woman's work is ever uninteresting, and when all their cylinders are running, as they are here, attention deserves to be paid. Grade:B
