Review of The Bostonians (1984) by Kajori A — 29 Jun 2008

Vanessa Redgrave is excellent in parts, whereas Christopher Reeve is merely stiff as Basil Ransom, the Southern gentleman. But it is Madeleine Potter's Verena that is really the weak link in the film: she lacks presence and is hardly the powerful orator of the book.

In fact, one wonders why two fairly intelligent people would be willing to go to such extraordinary lengths to win her affections. Also, in spite of its painstaking attention to period detail, I wish this film had a greater sense of historical context.

After all, The Bostonians is not simply a love story in which Ransom gets away with the prize, but, as A.S. Byatt has pointed out, a novel that pits the reforming North (Olive is a Bostonian suffragate) against the reactionary South (Ransom is a chauvinist determined to get his woman).

Ransom wins his girl but his "victory" is undercut by typical Jamesian irony at the end of the novel: Verena, though glad to have run off with Ransom, is nevertheless in tears and "it is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last that she was destined to shed".

James has been much criticised for his indifference to "political effort"(although Eliot spoke approvingly of "a mind so fine that no idea could violate it"), but surely the closing line introduces a note of ambivalence that makes us rethink the meaning of the book as a whole.

Unfortunately, such subtlety of tone is largely absent from the film, or perhaps I'm being too demanding - I've always loved James!