Wings of the Dove

1997

Helena Bonham Carter film clips

Raw screen grabs

Scoop's notes:

A very strong package. Novel by Henry James, exquisite photography, spectacular locales in England and Venice, a beautiful star, good acting and an unusually explicit nude scene.

It is possible to argue that this is an outstanding movie, although it received only limp support from the Academy Awards. They nominated it for best cinematography and costume design, but not for best art direction, which was a criminal omission. The attention to detail in the sets is spectacular, so finely crafted that even the shades of blue are co-ordinated from scene to scene. Carter was nominated as Best Actress, and the writer was nominated for best adaptation from another medium.

I suppose the film was hurt by the same thing that kept me from enjoying it completely. It's a slow-paced, Victorian costume drama. On the surface it looks like a Merchant-Ivory snoozefest. But it's not, nor is it a chickflick weeper (men and women score it identically at IMDb). It's a complex psychological study, and worth owning.

Here's the premise. Kate is in dire financial straits. Her mother is dead and her dad is a penniless derelict. Her mother was born into a rich family, but threw it all away for love. Kate now has the opportunity to return to society, if she heeds the advice and matchmaking recommendations of her wealthy aunt. Only one problem. Kate, like her mother, is already in love with a man who doesn't care about material possessions. This particular man is not a pauper, exactly, but an intelligent, crusading newspaper reporter, kind of a fin de siecle Ralph Nader.

There is one way that she can have both love and money. She concocts a plan in which her reporter will seduce a dying American heiress with no real family. If the plan works, heiress dies, leaves her money to the reporter, and reporter marries Kate. All well and good except that Kate comes to love the heiress, who is not merely pathetic because of her health, but is a truly loving and kind person. The newspaper reporter also falls in love with the heiress for real.

Could work out anyway. I mean, so what? Despite the fact that Kate manipulates the reporter first into then out of the heiress' bed, the American girl leaves her fortune to him anyway. He says he will never take the money, and will marry Kate only if she'll do it without the cash. Kate responds that she'll do it without the cash if reporter boy can swear he still isn't in love with the memory of the heiress as his one true love. He can't.

The James characters are complex. If she can't have both, Kate doesn't know whether she wants the money or the man's heart, and her vacillation causes some twists along the way, including her betrayal of her own plan. If she had not caused the heiress to find out about the plan at one point, she would have ended up with the man and the money, although the man would still have had the American's love in his heart. That's no big deal by modern standards. We can accept that people have loved others besides ourselves, and in fact a husband who proved to be so pure would probably turn out better than one who was a mere co-conspirator, but this novel was written in 1902, and it was then believable that Kate would derail her own plan because she needed to be the one true love. The turn of the century was also the turn of these attitudes into modern ones. If you locate the story 25 years earlier, in 1877, a plot like Kate's would be considered diabolical. James probably could not have published the story at that time. If you locate the story 25 years later, in flapper-era 1927, the sophisticated readers would have wondered, as we do, why the hell she screwed up her own plan? But Kate does not belong to either of those eras, she's trapped betwen Victorian conventionalism and modern pragmatism, and her muddled motivations make perfect sense in that context.

I think the most interesting part of the story is that everybody probably really knows what everyone else is doing, and it doesn't really matter. The American probably knew that the whole thing was a set-up from the start, certainly before she was told. Even after she found out for sure, she still left the guy all her money. She might have halted the deception if she thought they were heartless cons who didn't care a fig for her, but she sensed that the two schemers really loved her in spite of the con, and she more or less let it happen because she was getting exactly what she wanted out of the deal anyway.

So everyone left all the unpleasant side largely unremarked, and pretended that everything was as it seemed to be.

At least for a while.
 

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There is no hint of nudity until the final few minutes, and then we see one of the most explicit nude scenes ever done by a mainstream actress. Helena Bonham Carter is seen naked from every angle, include a surprisingly lingering camera angle up her bum.