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The films of James Ivory and his producer Ismail Merchant are synonymous with elegance, style, and taste, and the effect is bolstered by the fact that the characters in them are possessed of elegance, style, and taste. Films such as "Heat and Dust", "A Room with a View", "Howard's End", and "The Remains of the Day" take us through perfectly-observed upper-crust English manners and mores yet - even though they are lifted by very fine performances - they have moments which are either bland or lack life. The "Remains of the Day" is, however, a textbook example of how to create insistent drama in characters who might simply be taking tea.
Unfortunately, "The Golden Bowl" is too often one-dimensional and obvious. The bowl itself (found in an antique shop by lovers Jeremy Northam and Uma Thurman) is a much-too-transparent symbol both for what lies beneath the surface and for happiness turned bad, coming as it does with an almost invisible crack. Furthermore, as heads roll rather bloodily in an opening flashback, it is a bit too clear that doom is high up on the agenda.
It is doom, preceded by warmth, love and, of course, good manners, which defines the lives of a rich American art dealer (Nick Nolte), his wide-eyed daughter (Kate Beckinsale), her manipulative friend (Uma Thurman), and the friend's silver-tongued lover (Jeremy Northam), with the latter two continuing to see one another after Beckinsale and Northam are married.
Certainly all the performances are flawless and each actor successfully fine-tunes the gap between what's said and what's not. Moreover they do well not to drown in a film that is stuffed with dialogue and - because it repeats itself far too often - is much too long. It seems that Merchant-Ivory are re-hashing their trademark ideas without much commitment but at least they have terrific actors to help them.
