Washington Square
Director: Agnieszka Holland. Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Albert Finney, Ben Chaplin, Maggie Smith, Judith
Ivey, Jennifer Garner. Screenplay: Carol Doyle (from the novel by Henry James).
The central figure in Washington Square–or non-central figure, but we'll get to that–is Catherine
Sloper, a plain but earnest young heiress whose need for love is trampled by her family's cruel neglect
and her fiancé's own weak will. Ironically, Henry James's story about a woman with no advocates has been one of his most
endurantly popular works. Even more perversely, the role of humble, overlooked Catherine has been
an award magnet for glamorous actresses, most famously in the case of Olivia de Havilland's Oscar-winning
work in the 1949 film adaptation The Heiress.
William Wyler, the auteur behind The Heiress, was one of Hollywood's most notoriously
tyrannical directors, and the revenge drama he cooked out of James's original recipe (filtered through Ruth and Augustus
Goetz's famous stage adaptation)
essentially reflected his own fascination with power and retribution. What immediately
distinguishes Agnieszka Holland's new version of Washington Square, then, is its recentering of the
power-politics in the story and, indeed, a remarkable and fruitful synergy of subject and
storytellers.
For the first time on film, you see, Catherine's story is told by a director and an actress with whom she
bears much in common. Both Holland and star Jennifer Jason Leigh have contributed
years of solid, sometimes spectacular work to the male-dominated film industry, but
neither has received the critical or popular recognition they deserve. In their sensitive
hands, Washington Square comes closer than did The Heiress to what James originally wrote:
an elegy to a woman whom few people notice and no one loves, told to us by women who, at least
professionally, can very nearly relate.
The film opens with a long, continuous shot that begins off the coast of mid-19th-century
New York, swoops through parks and over avenues, and sneaks into an old brownstone
where, in an upstairs bedroom, a woman dies while giving birth. Sustained opening shots
can be empty gimmicks (anyone see The Birdcage?), but Jerzy Zielinski's vivid
camerawork shifts moods so subtly in each new context that, within minutes, the various moody
textures of Old New York—from public pageantry to private grief—are established.
Dr. Austin Sloper (Albert Finney), the man whose residence we have entered, is more
derailed by his wife's death than delighted by his daughter's birth. Named for her mother,
and thus a constant reminder of Dr. Sloper's loss, Catherine (Leigh) grows up with little
hope of connecting with her distant, resentful father. Worse, Austin's sister Lavinia
(Maggie Smith) fancies herself a surrogate mother but is too uncouth and undisciplined to
make of Catherine a sophisticated lady. "So this...magnificent creature is my child," laments Dr. Sloper,
beholding Catherine in a
gaudy, ill-fitting gown before they and Lavinia leave for the requisite period-film Society
Ball. Catherine is not the sharpest needle on the tree, but she can (and does) feel the sad,
punishing irony in her father's pronouncements.
She is, in fact, so conscious of her lack of "magnificence" that she is instantaneously
suspicious of the attentions of Morris Townsend (Ben Chaplin). Morris has no money and
a shady past, but all of New York acknowledges his rare good looks and, even rarer, his
lively charm and sense of adventure. Dr. Sloper is so impressed (or is it threatened?) by
Morris that he can only explain the young suitor's attentions to Catherine as financial
savvy. "He must think she has 80,000 a year," the Doctor says. Which, as it happens, she does,
but Catherine does not question his motives. She wagers all
she has on the purity of Morris's love, but meanwhile, Morris himself begins a protracted,
ugly rivalry with the skeptical Dr. Sloper. As Morris tells Catherine, "I stake my pride on
proving to your father that he is wrong," failing to realize that his intended declaration of
love has become a declaration of war. For his part, Dr. Sloper whisks Catherine off to Europe, primarily to distance Catherine
from Morris, but also in pathetic pursuit of Morris's globe-trotting, foreign-bred charm.
The tragedy of Washington Square is that, by the end of the film, the only shadow of love
that survives is the jealous, passionate admiration that exists between Morris and the
doctor. Catherine has been erased from her own romance.
The decision to cast Leigh is a big risk with big payoffs. Most famous for playing hookers
and addicts in films like Last Exit to Brooklyn and the hypnotic Georgia, Leigh's participation in a costume drama is an almost absurd
proposition. The incongruities between her persona and the period, however, serve to reinforce the
essential awkwardness Catherine Sloper feels in her own environment. The skittish,
chameleon-like quality that has kept Leigh from being a star is perfectly suited to
Catherine. In some scenes, her fiercely mannered playing—a personal style that has earned the actress as
much derision as acclaim—is a logical underscoring of both the rigorously mannered society around her and
her own awkwardness as a member therein. In other scenes, though, Leigh becomes so still and tremulous
that she almost disappears into the celluloid, nervously paralyzed until her misery and confusion are
so credible and compelling they are almost uncomfortable to behold.
Chaplin, the Hugh Grant-ish twinkie from The Truth About Cats & Dogs, makes an
admirable about-face to become this brooding, swanky manipulator. As in that film,
however, he projects a wheezy lack of mystery: a bad move in a role once played by
Montgomery Clift. Finney and Smith are, as always, convincing, but they show no new
sides of their prodigious talents. Smith's Lavinia, in particular, is a near-transplant of her
kooky chaperone from A Room With a View. Holland, whose previous credits include the German drama Europa, Europa and the
kiddie-pleaser The Secret Garden, was smart to choose a tight, simple story that allows
for a few idiosyncratic touches but matches more closely with her essential narrative
conservatism. Recently guilty of filling her films with too many climaxes, the director
shows considerable discipline in building the tension between her characters until the
drama naturally reaches its own critical mass.
Holland has none of the natural genius of a filmmaker like Jane Campion, and Washington
Square has little of the daring or visual audacity of Campion's own James adaptation, last
year's grievously ignored The Portrait of a Lady. At the same time,
Holland's straight-forward storytelling may give audiences more access into James than did Campion's
almost frightening originality. If Washington Square is not necessarily ground-breaking, it does bear the marks of
diligent artists lending their talents to strong material. Holland and Leigh are among the last two
film artists on Earth who will ever be found guilty of the Lost World Syndrome: namely, making the
same movie over and over simply because they can. Neither woman's work is ever uninteresting, and when all
their cylinders are running, as they are here, attention deserves to be paid. B+