Another sumptuous looking film from Holland, who begins by prowling through a house and encountering a mother who's died in childbirth. Cut to - the remaining daughter has become extremely dependent on her father (Albert Finney), who's a bit temperamental. She grows up to be gawky, nervy Jennifer Jason Leigh, heiress to some fortune, who is courted by unemployed adventurer Ben Chaplin to the father's displeasure. 'Get a job', we keep shouting at the screen, but he's a shiftless, charming shit.
When Leigh announces her intention to marry him without the fortune, father takes her away to Europe, where she grows some balls. Meanwhile aunt Maggie Smith, of Variable Accent US Inc. (why not cast Americans?), sticks her oar in to help the couple. It's a stingy tale. The servants seem quite earwiggy, openly so.
Carol Doyle adapted Henry James' 1880 novel. With Judith Ivey, Jennifer Garner. DP Jerzy Zielinski.
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| Warning sign #1: he didn't run away from this. |
Obscure fact: Henry James was born in Washington Square but when he revisited in the early 1900s he was dismayed already by how built up it had become, and that his family home had been torn down.
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