
Directed by Iain Softley
Adapted by Hossein Amini from the novel by Henry James
Review by Adam Gallari
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Period pieces: we love them, we hate them, we love to hate them and hate to love them. They are guilty pleasures, atavistic indulgences, a voyeurism into a time we want to assume was better, grander than our own, yet one we simultaneously feel the need to debase in order to show how we have since moved on, matured, evolved into a better, more rounded people. Some have and will argue that the period piece is nothing more than a crutch, window

I first saw The Wings of the Dove in 2009, over a decade after it debuted in cinemas in 1997. I was coming to the end of my master’s degree and looking for things to do that would allow me to decompress while simultaneously fooling myself into believing that I was still working. By that point in time, too, I wanted desperately out of Southern California. The burnout of a master’s coupled with the Groundhog Day nature of living in a place where every day was 80 and sunny had taken its toll, so I retreated into films that might serve to mirror the themes and tropes I’d been battling for the previous two years.
The Wings of the Dove was one of the last films in this series, and on the surface it was a relatively simple and familiar tale of a love triangle, conventions and impasses—something ripe for the rise of cliché and melodrama, but this was not to be the case. The film, which moves between London and Venice in 1910, is a relatively faithful adaptation to the Henry James novel on which it is based, and seemed to fly in the face of all the understood notions of what a period piece should be. Yes, its cinematography was grand and sweeping in scope; yes, the costumes were baroque and regal,


To say the beauty of film is that it is a visual medium might seem like the most obvious, puerile assessment one could make regarding the art form, yet it is exactly this aspect that I love most about it. The inability of an audience to access a character’s interiority thrills me, since, as a writer of prose, it is the interior where I dwell. I guide thinking. I manipulate via

(Insert Eat, Pray, Love joke here.)
I do not pretend to know much about the formulaic elements of filmmaking and cinematography. I do not have a firm grasp on the traditions which modern directors are following nor the trajectories which they champion or from which to they choose to deviate, and I assume that my reasons for loving certain films in recent years would smack of sacrilege to most

Those familiar with Henry James will know that, if anything, he is a thinking author. To some, this is his greatest weakness, that he is too cerebral, too concerned with the internal landscape and the minutiae of the obscure. His late works especially are magnificent chores, works that ultimately pave the way for Woolf and Joyce, but which do not immediately scream ‘Adapt-me-now’ to any but the most masochistic of screenwriters who, upon undertaking the task, will find themselves needing to condense page after page after page of internal reflection and dense self-exploration into:
INT. APARTMENT, LONDON -- DAY
Merton Densher stands in front of a fire holding a letter…

Yet what I find myself most enthralled by in this movie, what becomes more and more intoxicating as I study it in my own way, is Helena Bonham Carter’s portrayal of Kate Croy, the


Her performance recalls some of the best femme fatales of Hollywood’s by-gone noir years, and one wonders if, in a way, Carter missed her true calling—to stand alongside the likes of Crawford and Stanwyck as they plotted downfalls from the shadowy corners of gin and smoke filled rooms. In its own way, too, The Wings of the Dove recalls certain noir qualities. Densher’s battles between Kate (Carter), whom he professes to love, and Millie (Alison Elliott), the dying American heiress whom it is his job to seduce but to whom he is invariably drawn, fall into the quintessential noir dichotomy between the “light” and “dark” woman. Millie is fair, innocent, blonde. She dresses constantly in pastels. It is the simple things in life she

Carter’s Croy is a woman we loathe and love simultaneously, whose Machiavellian nature is born of a profound longing and pain. But where she outpaces even the best noir roles, is that unlike the great women of noir she is not solely an allegory. She is not the embodiment of evil, rather she humanizes it, showcases in her own way Arendt’s notion of its banality, and articulates how reason, the very quality that separates us from animals, can debase us in a way alien to the natural world. Animals do not possess an instinct for cruelty, let alone the ability to rationalize it. And despite this, despite my own reason and rationality and mores, each time I watch her lift her gaze or shift the angle of her neck I am seduced by her more.
It is the ending, though, the penultimate and ultimate scenes of the film, though, where The Wings of the Dove takes its cue more from noir than from the James novel. The penultimate, a love scene in which Kate climbs into Densher’s bed and lays in a pose similar to the odalisque painting shown when Millie and Densher officially meet, is stunning and perfect and should have been the final scene in the film. The majority of it comprises her face, a

The final conversation parallels James’ actual closing dialogue, which I will not spoil here, but then inexplicably we are on Densher in Venice, accompanied by Millie’s voiceover and the notion that he has returned to the “light” woman, the right woman—that he has indeed chosen correctly. It is incomprehensible, forced and flawed, so obviously tacked on so that we might be finally allowed the moral compass the film has never overtly offered. It is too proscriptive, this idea that Densher has retained his humanity while Kate has jettisoned hers. The book never offers such a clean end; it does not debase Kate in such a way; rather the book shows that she is the perspicuous one, the one still haunted by conscience, and because of this I choose to believe the movie ends on the last shot of her face, worn and broken and drained yet still refusing to fully acknowledge that she is the architect of her own misery. It is a face I have tried to write many times and always failed to fully articulate, for never have I been able to project such passionate yet icy vulnerability. I am in love with that face. I am haunted by that face.
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