The Portrait of a Lady.

With her film version of The Portrait of a Lady, Jane Campion doesn't just adapt Henry James. She refutes him. But it's a generous refutation which, on the whole, plays fair with the material. The novel isn't jazzed up or sent up. In some ways Campion's dreamy, sub-aqueous style is a good equivalent of James's prose, though she lacks his deadpan sarcasm. Campion honorably works to realize the drama of the novel even as she shapes it to her own ends. However, by the end of the movie, those ends take their toll on the material.

The script by Laura Jones is a model of concise faithfulness. The plot isn't dumbed down but merely trimmed for dramatic litheness. An American heiress of the 1870s, Isabel Archer, embarks on a voyage of self-discovery in Europe. Rejecting two eminently worthy suitors, she marries the ultra-refined Gilbert Osmond, discovers him to be a fortune hunter, honorably thwarts his plan to marry off his daughter (by a previous marriage) to the British lord who was once Isabel's own suitor, and further enrages her spouse by speeding to the bedside of a man he despises, her soulmate Ralph Touchett. After Ralph's funeral, Isabel must confront another of her former beaux and decide whether or not to return to Gilbert. The scenarist makes a mostly shrewd selection of those scenes that carry the main action. She adroitly links them with her own (minor) inventions, and tactfully clips James's luxuriant dialogues just enough to make them playable. She also knows when to leave well enough alone. Isabel's greeting to a suitor, "I can't tell you how I hoped you wouldn't come," is the greatest courtship quencher since Elizabeth Bennet told off Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. The line's author is James, not Jones; but Jones had the wit to leave it in.

Campion has mounted most of the script with panache and point. One memorable instance: Gilbert's daughter Pansy smiles warmly, even encouragingly, as an impecunious lover pleads his cause at a ball, but a close-up shows us that the girl's hands are treating the silver tea service with as much solicitude as her lover's feelings. She is her father's daughter and will obey him. That close-up is worth a thousand Jamesian words.

But there are also lapses. Staging Isabel's tour of the Near East as a silent movie travelogue comes across as unfunny camp. (That the "silent" movie has dialogue makes it doubly anachronistic.) Late in the film, when the disenchanted Isabel enters her husband's Roman mansion, the doors clang behind her like prison gates. Thanks, we get the point. But, more often, the director's visual solutions work, and I loved the way the close-ups and two-shots (photography by Stuart Dryburgh) seem to float up out of the haze of cafes and parlors as if the buzzing world were being shut out while we eavesdropped on these intimately conversing souls.

The film's relatively overt violence and sexuality will put off strict Jamesians, but I felt that Campion employed just the right dosage of sensation in particular instances to elucidate the quality of a person or relationship. The nature of Gilbert's tie to Madam Merle is made explicit but not by exposed flesh or heads denting a pillow. Gilbert's assault on his wife for her supposed treachery, strictly verbal in the book, is here physically violent, but it's the right degree of violence: no split lips or black eyes, but Gilbert lifting Isabel like a sulky child onto piled cushions, followed by smacking her hands (Daddy knows best). Greater abuse follows and Isabel is sent sprawling to the floor. But Gilbert doesn't push or punch; he simply steps on the hem of her skirt. The fastidious brutality of the man is in that maneuver.

The quality of the acting ranges wildly. John Malkovich's Gilbert may be too unrelievedly saturnine, yet critic Stanley Kauffman was right to note that Malkovich captures Gilbert's "almost disinterested viciousness." The most praised performance, Barbara Hershey's Madam Merle, seemed to me a thing of sufficient sexual glamour somewhat marred by unincisive diction. In the supporting cast, three performances are perfect: John Gielgud's brief turn is winter sunlight. Christian Bales is delightfully ardent and silly as Pansy's suitor, the silliness undercutting the ardency, the ardency mitigating the silliness. And Pansy herself is miraculously realized by a new face (and what a face!): Valentina Cervi, fetchingly candid, maddeningly placid.

And now we come to the big headache of the movie: Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer. That's not an insult, just a description. Kidman, from start to finish, looks as if she were suffering from migraine. Sixty-odd scenes of migraine, 150 minutes of migraine. Migraine when she is erotically daydreaming, when she is weighing moral considerations, when she is being kissed, when she is contemplating a bit of dessert. I once considered Kidman an adequate lightweight actress. No more. Any actor who can come close to wrecking an entire movie strictly with the force of her glumness is a major talent, a heavyweight drag.

Buy why did Campion not only allow this performance but abet it with an Elsa Lanchester/Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, blue-green filters on the camera, and almost no variation in the delivery of dialogue? Here we come to the nub of the movie and why it's a refutation of James even as it adapts his tale with considerable skill.

Jane Campion may be known as a feminist but she is above all a Lawrentian (see Commonweal, January 14, 1996). In her world, as in D.H. Lawrence's, a powerful, healthy sexuality is the concomitant of abiding love and mental health. The invalid Ralph Touchette can certainly love but is on his way to the boneyard. It is the handsome American suitor Goodwood whom Campion has plainly designated as Isabel's true bed- and soulmate. Isabel's surrender to Gilbert is a form of perversion.

In Henry James's novel, honor, not sexual fulfillment or even true love, is the highest attainment. James's heroine is actively seeking to fulfill her destiny when she marries Gilbert and, in her generosity, she endows him with the money he needs to fulfill himself. But then the marriage leads her into dark moral territory, and she is nearly overcome by doubts, qualms, even despair. Her final return to Gilbert isn't motivated by her hopes of winning back his love. It's a return to honor because the marriage into which she deliberately entered is where her honor lies. This is a sublime exaltation of the adage, "You made your bed, now lie in it."

Oh blessed dinosaur, Henry James! A modern artist if there ever was one, Jane Campion knows that nobody nowadays lies in the bed he or she has made but hies to Reno and strips the bed. That is why she changes the ending to offer Isabel a chance to find romantic fulfillment.

I have no aesthetic quarrel with this. But Campion evidently had such trouble accounting for Isabel's self-destructive choice of husband that she felt obliged to turn the tremulous but strong young woman into a neurotic suffering from delayed adolescence. And with this I do have a quarrel. To see a strong woman founder, then pull herself free of a moral morass, is dramatic. But to watch a delayed adolescent get nervier and nervier for 150 minutes can be a bore.

The film is done with such art that it keeps boredom at arm's length for most of its running time. But in its final twenty minutes - several scenes of tense talking heads making revelations to one another - I finally learned what I did not wish to learn: that I could not care what happened to Nicole Kidman's, or Jane Campion's, Isabel Archer.

Loved the frame. Hated the portrait.