Thanks to a revision of the U.S. copyright law in 1978, novels become part of the public domain fifty years after the death of the writer. Accordingly, a surge of period films featuring the Gilded Age can be observed in cinemas today. The Golden Bowl, the latest contribution, is based on the 1904 novel of the same title by Henry James. Director James Ivory dazzles filmviewers with lavish sets, magnificent architecture, and fabulous costuming in Europe during most of the film, but shows "American City" (obviously New York) as, crass, tasteless, and ugly. Filmed at castles and palaces in England and Italy, The Golden Bowl reminds Americans that European culture was artistically superior to American culture a century ago, if not still today. Having become America’s first billionaire by supplying bituminous coal to fuel the industrial revolution in North America, Adam Verver (played by Dick Nolte), now spends his time in Europe buying works of art, palaces, and even the company of a beautiful female companion, Charlotte Stant (played by Uma Thurman), whom he later marries. Verver is devoted to his daughter Maggie (played by Kate Beckinsale) and agrees for her to marry an authentic if less than affluent Italian prince, Amerigo (played by Jeremy Northam), after the two are brought together by London socialite Fanny Assingham (played by Anjelica Huston). However, when Charlotte meets Amerigo at the palace near Rome that Verver is having restored, the two have a love affair. When they return to London for Maggie’s wedding with Amerigo, they enter a Bloomsbury antique shop to find a wedding gift; although Charlotte wants to buy a crystal bowl inlaid with a gold design, Amerigo sees a crack and leaves the shop. Charlotte, who cannot afford to pay a tidy sum for the artifact, promises to return someday to make the purchase. After the marriage, Amerigo and Maggie produce a son, to whom Maggie is devoted, and Verver marries Charlotte. Meanwhile, Verver continues to take his daughter on trips to acquire new works of art, which are to be shipped to a museum that he wants to build in American City. While they are out of town, Amerigo and Charlotte continue a love affair that many, including Fanny, observe. Fanny asks Charlotte to behave more sensibly, but Charlotte’s need for love is obsessive in an era when moderation and self-abnegation were signs of good breeding. Then one day Maggie wanders into the same shop in Bloomsbury and decides to purchase the golden bowl as a birthday present for her father. When the object is delivered the next day by the proprietor, he sees a framed photo of the couple that came into his shop five years earlier and reports the coincidence to Maggie. When she confronts Amerigo with the report that the two were seeing each other a few days before her wedding, he admits the indiscretion but promises fidelity. (A tragic adulterous affair in his family that took place in his infancy still haunts him.) Maggie then persuades her father to take the treasures to America so that Charlotte will be out of the picture. Treated coldly by Amerigo and Maggie, Charlotte produces an abundance of tears but dutifully agrees to accompany Verver on the trip across the Atlantic (thus avoiding the fate of her fictional contemporary Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth). However, the real hero of The Golden Bowl is the austere but kind Verber, a character doubtless based on Andrew Carnegie, who gave $350 million of his wealth back to America in the form of art, books, libraries, and educational endowments. The Golden Bowl, thus, asks us to consider what American billionaires are doing today—lobbying for a tax cut or engaging in philanthropy? "The man who dies rich," Carnegie once said, "dies disgraced." MH

I want to comment on this film

The Golden Bowl
by Henry James

Novel by Henry James, published in 1904. Wealthy American widower Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie live in Europe, where they collect art and relish each other's company. Through the efforts of the manipulative Fanny Assingham, Maggie becomes engaged to Amerigo, an Italian prince in reduced circumstances, but remains blind to his rekindled affair with her longtime friend Charlotte Stant. Maggie and Amerigo marry, and later, after Charlotte and Adam have also wed, both spouses learn of the ongoing affair, though neither seeks a confrontation. Not until Maggie buys the gilded crystal bowl of the title as a birthday present for Adam does truth crack the veneer of propriety.