Kate, played with flashing eyes and bold imagination by Helena Bonham Carter, is a poor girl with a tenuous foothold in society. Her father is a penniless drunkard. Her mother is dead. She is taken in by her wealthy Aunt Maude (Charlotte Rampling), who wants to marry her off to the best advantage--perhaps to Lord Mark (Alex Jennings). But Kate loves Merton Densher (Linus Roache), an ill-paid journalist who cheerfully admits he doesn't believe the things he writes. Maude forbids the marriage and even threatens to cut off the weekly shillings she pays Kate's father.
What is Kate prepared to do? Characters talk a great deal in Henry James, but are sometimes maddeningly obscure about what they mean (does any other novelist use the word "intercourse'' more frequently, while not meaning by that word or any other what we immediately think of?). They talk much less in this film, where facial expressions imply the feelings that are talked around in the novel. My guess is that Kate might have eventually married the odious Lord Mark, while continuing quietly to see Merton Densher.
But that is not necessary. At a dinner party, she meets Millie Theale (Alison Elliott), the rich young American, and discovers that Millie has an unnamed disease, possesses hardly a protector in the world except for her traveling companion (Elizabeth McGovern), and intends to see Europe and die. One of the things Millie wants to experience in Europe is romance; she doesn't say so, but she is looking for a man, and when she sees Merton, she asks Kate about him.
"He's a friend of the family,'' Kate replies--a lie of omission, because Kate and Merton are secretly engaged. Kate's plan is clear. She will accompany Millie to Venice. Merton will join them there. Millie will fall in love with Merton, marry him, die and leave him her fortune. Merton will then have the money he needs to marry Kate. This scheme unfolds only gradually in the James novel, emerging from behind leisurely screens of dialogue and implication. It is more clear in the film, especially in a dark, atmospheric scene where Kate and Merton walk down deserted Venetian passages. She tells him she is returning to London and outlines what she expects him to do. Then, to seal the bargain, they have sex for the first time. (They do it standing up against the old stones of Venice; one imagines the ghost of James turning aside with a shudder.) Iain Softley's film, written by Hossein Amini, emphasizes Kate's desperation and downplays her cold calculation. It softens the villainy of Merton by making it clear how desperately Millie does want to be involved in a romance with him; is he simply granting her dying wish? There is another fugitive strand of affection in the film that I did not sense in the book: Millie and Kate genuinely like each other, and it's almost as if they strike an unexpressed bargain, in which Kate lets Millie have the use of Merton--lets her find what she came to Europe for. The money is crucial, of course, but too vulgar to be discussed.
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