While a novelist can build characters in layers of accumulating detail, a film director has just two hours to explain their inner lives. The filmmaker must turn all that material into visual reward, and risks losing the gradual process of revelation. Jane Campion has made the novel her own, as she should, but she has given the audience only the external surface of James's characters. We are not invited to understand them. If she has missed the essence of the people, Campion certainly delivers a characteristically brooding landscape.
Skirts rustle through the dark corridors, rain pelts the heavily curtained windows.
Everything looks stark, dark, forbidding. It is, at times, a ballet of umbrellas. She has entered a world of whispered plans, conversational codes, and eligible men, most of whom fall in love with her. John Malkovich, playing a role that has become a second skin and speaking in a voice imaginable only in an amoeba, can make a wicked threat of even the mildest of words. So poisonous is he that he throws the film off balance.