'Golden Bowl' Cracked: Merchant/Ivory's Misstep with Henry James

| Aug 8, 2017

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 10, 2003

One of James's juiciest scenarios, but barely anybody involved in this enterprise seems to have caught its groove.

Full Review | Sep 4, 2001

It suffers mightily from its deliberate pacing, pale characterizations, obvious plot and some woeful miscasting.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 11, 2001

coiled, nuanced, resonant tale.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 25, 2001

In this movie, all displays of passion feel like gaudy pantomime.

Full Review | May 18, 2001

It is beautifully, dramatically and grandly long, tedious, boring and slow.

| May 18, 2001

Makes the viewer wish that Ivory had cast a more accomplished actress -- Kate Winslet, perhaps, or Cate Blanchett -- who could give dimension to the character and indicate subtext in a way that Thurman can't.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 18, 2001

The Golden Bowl is a feast for those who love nuanced conversation, unspoken emotion and guarded looks.

Full Review | May 18, 2001

Ivory has been away from period literary adaptations, backbone of the Merchant Ivory reputation, for some time. It's good to have him back, but Golden Bowl shows he needs to do some work to reacquire his golden touch.

| May 18, 2001

A fairly satisfying flick.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 18, 2001

On the whole, though, it's easy to think of this Golden Bowl as half full rather than half empty.

Full Review | May 18, 2001

May not be the best film to come from the Ismail Merchant/James Ivory team, but it's certainly one of the most beautiful.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | May 18, 2001

It kept me at arm's length, but that is where I am supposed to be; the characters are after all at arm's length from each other, and the tragedy of the story is implied but never spoken aloud.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 18, 2001

A handsome production and a story well told.

Full Review | May 17, 2001

A victim of painfully drawn out excessiveness.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 17, 2001

If not for its high-cult pedigree -- from a Henry James novel, adapted by the tony Merchant-Ivory team -- The Golden Bowl would seem the stuff of raging soap opera.

Full Review | May 17, 2001

Looks exquisite at first, upon closer inspection its flaws become all too apparent.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 17, 2001

The novel is inevitably stripped of its rich characterological garments and is left relatively naked as a clever plot -- in the basest sense 'theatrical.'

Full Review | May 2, 2001

Visually lovely, awkward, long-winded.

| Apr 27, 2001