Contrivance trips up ‘The Golden Bowl’

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In theaters

THE GOLDEN BOWL, 130 minutes, R, directed by James Ivory, written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on Henry James’ novel. Starts tomorrow, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

Toward the end of “The Golden Bowl,” the latest Merchant-Ivory collaboration based on a novel by Henry James, Charlotte Stant (Uma Thurman), a mincing American socialite living abroad in England and Italy, makes a throwaway comment that gets to the crack in the film’s foundation: “Ultimately, I found it rather contrived.”

The line, which is supposed to be Charlotte’s opinion of a novel she’s given as a gift, pops off the screen in ways that James Ivory, the film’s director, and Ismail Merchant, its producer, probably never intended.

Indeed, “The Golden Bowl” hinges on a plot contrivance that’s so unfortunate and given such heavy-handed treatment – it involves the golden bowl of the title, but fans of the novel will be disappointed in how awkwardly that bowl is handled here – it undermines what’s otherwise a gorgeous-looking period piece that gets the small details right.

In brief, the plot: When Charlotte and the Italian prince Amerigo (Jeremy Northam) realize they can’t wed due to financial considerations – both are broke – their romance is nevertheless rekindled after Amerigo marries the heiress Maggie Verver (Kate Beckinsale) and Charlotte marries Maggie’s billionaire father, Adam (Nick Nolte).

To say that complications ensue is an understatement. As Charlotte and Amerigo lose all sense and sensibility and fall hard into each other’s arms, Maggie and Adam, who share an unusually close relationship, eventually join the rest of their swanky friends in becoming suspicious of the couple’s growing fondness for each other.

Filmed on location in Europe, “The Golden Bowl” is sublime in its locals and terrific in its social situations, but some of the performances are often too stagy and wooden to suit. Thurman and Nolte generate the best heat, but Beckinsale was better as the lipsticked nurse in “Pearl Harbor” (that’s not a compliment), Northam will probably never be allowed back into Italy after playing Amerigo as an Italian stereotype, and Angelica Huston, who appears as Maggie’s grimacing American friend, Fanny, vacillates between an accent that’s downright Texan – and outright British.

“The Golden Bowl” is hardly a wash, but those craving a cinematic dose of James would be better served renting two superior films – Iaian Softley’s “The Wings of the Dove” and Agnieszka Holland’s “Washington Square.”

Grade: C+

SWORDFISH, 99 minutes, R, directed by Dominic Sena, written by Skip Woods.

In the opening moments of Dominic Sena’s new film, “Swordfish,” John Travolta, the film’s star, addresses the camera with a comment about Hollywood that’s at once honest and ironic. He says that most Hollywood movies are crap.

That this comes from Travolta, a man who has made more than his share of crap, not the least of which includes “Battlefield Earth,” a movie that stands as one of the worst disasters to come out of Hollywood in years, “Swordfish” generates interest.

The surprising news? For a while, it actually sustains that interest, which wasn’t exactly the case when the film was first previewed for test audiences. After failing to entertain them, “Swordfish,” like so many other potential blockbusters slung through the marketing machine, was plucked from an earlier release date so it could be re-edited. In this case, the effort was mostly worth it.

Sena, working from a script by Skip Woods, uses the first 45 minutes of his film to toy with the action genre and mock its conventions before eventually giving in and playing by the rules. It’s a shame he did so, especially since the first half of “Swordfish” is peppered with more wit and style than the entire length of Sena’s last film, the wretched “Gone in 60 Seconds.”

That might not sound like much – “Gone in 60 Seconds” is, after all, Nicolas Cage’s “Battlefield Earth.” But, as these films go, at least it’s a step in the right direction.

The film’s plot, such as it is, involves a gifted, freshly paroled computer hacker (Hugh Jackman), a counterterrorist named Gabriel (Travolta, looking like a post-modern version of the Quaker Oats man), and the seductress who brings them together (Halle Berry, proudly topless) so $9.5 billion can be stolen from a DEA slush fund. What initially makes sense eventually makes little sense as the film becomes as muddled as the infamously dense plot in 1996’s “Mission Impossible.”

In Travolta’s opening monologue, he argues that this is what audiences want – pyrotechnics, car chases, happy endings. Sena, who reveals himself to be more a populist than an artist, eventually delivers all three in a movie that might initially rail against action movie cliches – but which nevertheless made $18.4 million in its opening weekend after delivering more than its share of them.

Grade: C

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays in Style, Thursdays in the scene, Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.

THE VIDEO CORNER

Renting a video? NEWSfilm critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

O Brother, Where

Art Thou ? A-

Cast Away ? A-

Crouching Tiger,

Hidden Dragon ? A+

The House Of Mirth ? B

Shadow of the

Vampire ? B+

Traffic ? A

Antitrust ? D

Before Night Falls ? A

Best in Show ? A

Requiem for a Dream ? A

Vertical Limit ? B-

Pay it Forward ? C

Duets ? D

Quills ? B

What Women Want ? B

Yi Yi ? A

All the Pretty Horses ? C-

Miss Congeniality ? B

The Emperor’s

New Groove ? A-

Little Nicky ? F

One Day in September ? B+