I'm a bit puzzled by all the hostile comments on this movie.
I've read The Golden Bowl five times, at least. I have also seen most film and TV adaptations of James novels and novellas done since the 1970s and this one stands up very well under the double test: is it faithful to the book's spirit, is it a good film?
I loved this movie, have seen it twice and given it as a gift. I found it perfectly cast, filmed, and paced. TGB is a long dense intensely internal book but it has been faithfully rendered by a screenwriter who boldly brought the violence and threat at the core of the book forward in a fascinating sort of prologue, and made one of the book's most famous images, the Pagoda, part of a nightmare. Each time I see these sections I admire her ingenuity.
Uma Thurman broke my heart as the passionate, lonely, sensual Europeanized American who cannot have what she wants when she wants it. Yes, the part was played differently by Gayle Hunnicutt in the estimable British TV version, but so what? Thurman works because she makes it so clear how much more she wants Amerigo than the opposite and her verbal rebellion at one point is explosive (in a Jamesian way, of course).
Jeremy Northam is suitably lordly and devilishly handsome. His accent sounds just right to me, having been around Europeans who learned English from English speakers: the mix is sometimes inconsistent though charming.
Kate Beckinsale is just right as the limited innocent whose innocence is a kind of cruelty and watching her grow up, make the sacrifices she needs to while fighting through the pain of terrible awareness was haunting. Nick Nolte was sublime as the phlegmatic wealthy collector. You feel the roughness behind his suavity and the world-weariness. He's got all these amazing obejcts but what does he really have? His devotion to his daughter is pitched just right.
I loved how the film often cast him and Kate as isolated amid their stupefyinbgly beautiful collections. I loved how there are scenes opening the movie that take us back to the Prince's Renaissance forebears and that create dramatic irony when she re-enters the orbit of Maggie and Adam.
I was captivated by this movie even more the second viewing than the first, and even though the book is so familiar to me that I quote from it now and then. I own the Gayle Hunnicutt version and am glad there are too such stylish, intelligent, and very different takes on one of our greatest novels in English.
