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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts star in another of Merchant-Ivory's mangled and dumbed down literary illustrations.
Aug 8, 2003 | The contemporary Parisian setting of "Le Divorce" means that, unlike with other Merchant-Ivory movies, watching it is not the closest most of us will ever come to experiencing narcolepsy. Seeing Kate Hudson flit around Paris in the silly-chic outfits designed by Carole Ramsey is a more lively prospect than being asked to admire the attention to period detail in the team's usual stultifying exercises in literary illustration.
That doesn't mean that the Tasteful Two have suddenly learned how to make movies. "Le Divorce," adapted by director James Ivory and his usual conspirator in dullness Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from Diane Johnson's novel, is an attempt at a Jamesian comedy of modern manners done in the touristy, picture-postcard gloss of something like "Funny Face." It's the sort of thing that requires precision, timing, sexiness and a choreographer's gift for keeping the disparate cast of characters twirling in their separate spheres. For all the culture and taste that sits on the surface of Merchant-Ivory productions like the exquisite table setting for a meal that never arrives, they are some of the clumsiest filmmakers around.
With the exception of "A Room With a View" (a movie I could watch anytime), I've never seen a Merchant-Ivory film that didn't manage to mangle or misunderstand or dumb down its source. Some of the performances in "Howards End" or "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" could keep you from seeing how they screwed up those novels. And Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins' performances in "The Remains of the Day" might almost convince you that lousy novel was worthwhile in the first place.
I confess to finding Diane Johnson's novel a tad wearying, though there's no doubt it has structure and wit and an amused taste for American appetite doing civilized battle with European breeding. Ivory and Jhabvala's adaptation removes large swatches of character motivation, so that events happen without our understanding why and the behavior of the characters seems to make no sense.
Kate Hudson plays Isabel Walker (the name a nod to James's Isabel Archer), a footloose young American who arrives in Paris to help her half-sister Roxeanne prepare for the birth of her second child. The day Isabel arrives, Roxy's French husband Charles-Henri (Melville Poupaud) walks out on Roxy for another woman. A painting of St. Ursula that has been in the two sisters' family for years and which hangs in Roxy's apartment is suddenly thought to have been painted by de la Tour and it becomes a pawn in the divorce settlement. Meanwhile, Isabel becomes the mistress of Charles-Henri's uncle (Thierry Lhermitte), a wealthy right-wing politician whose traditional gift to his mistresses is an Hermes Kelly Bag. (That the bags go for about eighteen grand should give you an idea of just how wealthy he is.)
Other characters flit in and out, most awkwardly Matthew Modine as the American husband of Charles-Henri's new love and, most alarmingly, Glenn Close as an expatriate American novelist who hires Isabel to help organize her papers. (Moviegoers who have sat through "28 Days Later" may be hard pressed to decide which is scarier -- that movie's vision of London overtaken by zombie cannibals or Glenn Close in a Susan Sontag wig. When Close is called on to make an anti-poverty speech for a charity and says there's no telling who the next victims will be, you want to say, "Anybody who has to watch you act.")
The movie is handsomely shot by Pierre Lhomme (Bertrand Blier's "Mon Homme). This is Paris as you might fantasize it before a vacation with artfully distressed apartment buildings and chic shops. Though even here there is at times an inappropriate grandiosity. Johnson describes Roxy's mother-in-law Suzanne (Leslie Caron) as having "a small chateau." The place we see looks so immense you expect extras in Louis XIV garb to be milling around the gardens.
This kind of tourist brochure extravagance only gets you so far with the story jumping from place to place and, in the case of Naomi Watts's Roxy, the behavior inexplicable. Roxy refuses to grant Charles-Henri a divorce even though he's a self-absorbed little shit. And given the fact that, as the aggrieved party, she stands to lose her shirt if she doesnt file for divorce, she acts not only self-righteously but, given the fact that she's got one child to care for and another on the way, irresponsibly, and we never understand why she digs in her heels. Perhaps it's because Naomi Watts, even in a role as opaque as this one, seems to possess too much common sense for this kind of prudish stubbornness. The character needs a streak of comic hysteria, which Ivory doesn't know how to bring out in her. Roxy seems meant to be an emblem of American self-righteousness in the face of loose European morals, but it's hard to see the satire in that when, as a colleague observed to me after the screening, "every French character in the movie comes off as a cunt." (That's the British, nongender-specific epithet, by the way.)
