Spotlight
Spotlight Date: 25-February-07
Spoiler Rating: High
The Heiress (1949)/Washington Square (1997)
Henry James' novel Washington Square concerns a 19th-century woman whose life is marked by two men who should have loved her but didn't. Raised in a New York townhouse in the absence of a mother (who died giving her birth), Catherine Sloper is a plain, unworldly person of no great talent or charm. Her father, a doctor, treats her with moderately kind exasperation as the unfortunate inferior to his dead wife. Mostly he leaves her to his sister Lavinia, judging that she doesn't require much protection from the opposite sex. But Catherine does have one undeniable attraction: the prospect of an inheritance from both her parents' estates. When this apparently lands her a fiancé, her father sits up and takes notice.
William Wyler's take on the tale, "The Heiress," was a long time coming to DVD but proves entirely worth the wait. This excellent film, which garnered an Oscar for Olivia de Havilland in the title role, is razor-sharp and incisive from start to finish. It delivers an intensifying series of emotional Ows and Ouches and Owie-owie-owies, all of them horribly believable. For starters, the movie doesn't shy away from the fact that Catherine is an actual dullard, not an ugly duckling who might blossom into a swan. She spends all her time doing needlepoint and must be coached by her vivacious aunt (Miriam Hopkins) before venturing into public. But it's at a party that she meets Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift) and finds a new lease on life. He is gorgeous, attentive, and unembarrassed by her naiveté, and he has her hooked within a week.
It's easy to appreciate Catherine's budding sense of being alive and human and loved, but the pith of the story is how this leads to bitter understanding instead of triumph. Dr. Sloper (Ralph Richardson) takes one look at her suitor and decides he's a gold-digger, in large part because he can't imagine any able-bodied man truly desiring his daughter. He tells her this point blank when all other attempts at dissuading her from the match fall short. (Ouch!) At this juncture between the middle and final acts she leaves her timidity behind. Yet her newfound boldness only forces her lover to reveal himself. What she gains from her experience is self-awareness, a chance for revenge which concludes the picture on a stirring note, and then (presumably) long years of lonely disillusionment. Like Joan Fontaine (de Havilland's sister) in "Rebecca," Catherine is haunted by a dead woman to whom she is compared unfavorably, but in asserting herself she doesn't emerge with love and hope intact. (Owie!)
I liked "Washington Square" when I first saw it in 1997, but now I realize this version is no substitute for its predecessor. One noticeable difference is that whereas Aaron Copland's celebrated score embellished "The Heiress," the newer soundtrack chiefly serves to announce that one is watching an art film. This type of expression matches the almost reverential drippiness that pervades "Washington Square." Director Agnieszka Holland borrows Wyler's interesting use of mirrors but otherwise goes her own way. She launches the movie by showing Catherine's unpromising birth and childhood (after which she doesn't use the dead mother angle to its full potential), and this combines with Jennifer Jason Leigh's portrayal of the adult heroine to make it unclear whether she is mentally retarded or merely unaffected. Luckily, Leigh settles into a more obvious state of fluttering simplicity after she meets her lover. She then has to battle not only the distrust of her father (Albert Finney), but also the rivalry of her creepy aunt (Maggie Smith), who yearns to reserve some of Morris' attentions for herself.
This Morris (played well by Ben Chaplin) is more overtly cruel than Clift was, and perhaps he has reason to be since he waits a lot longer for his prize. Still, Clift's ambiguous rogue adds weight to the question, posed in both films, of whether Catherine would have been happy even if Morris did marry her for money. This underscores the inherent sorrow of the piece, that Catherine could never really win. Is it worse to feel like a loser with a father who disrespects you or a husband who doesn't want you? Wyler makes this quandary seem biting, Holland melancholy. Both directors attest that Henry James penned a good story which translates well to film.
Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.
