Synopsis
Adam Verver, a US billionaire in London, dotes on daughter Maggie. An impecunious Italian, Prince Amerigo, marries her even though her best friend, Charlotte Stant, is his lover. She and Amerigo keep this secret from Maggie, so Maggie interests her widowed father in Charlotte, who is happy with the match because she wants to be close to Amerigo. Charlotte desires him, the lovers risk discovery, Amerigo longs for Italy, Maggie wants to spare her father's pain, and Adam wants to return to America to build a museum. Amidst lies and artifice, what fate awaits adulterers?
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Cast
- Kate BeckinsaleMaggie Verver
- Uma ThurmanCharlotte Stant
- Jeremy NorthamPrince Amerigo
- Nick NolteAdam Verver
- Anjelica HustonFanny Assingham
- James FoxColonel Bob Assingham
- Madeleine PotterLady Castledean
- Nicholas DayLord Castledean
- Peter EyreA.R. Jarvis, Shopkeeper
- Nickolas GraceLecturer
Recommandations
- 90
Wall Street Journal
The team's (Merchant-Ivory) best adaptation yet of a Henry James novel. - 80
The New York Times
If this handsome, faithful, intelligent screen adaptation of the novel doesn't leave you devastated, its ominous sense of a rarefied moral and aesthetic world bending before the accelerating streetcar of history will leave you with a mournful sense of loss. - 75
Boston Globe
What Merchant, Ivory and Co. arrive at is a sort of handsomely illustrated Cliffs Notes version of the novel. - 70
L.A. Weekly
Seen in the bowl's metaphoric reflection, Nolte's Adam, with his patronizing wish to build a great art museum to "give something back" to the poor laborers who built his fortune, is a complex American monster. - 67
Entertainment Weekly
There's no mirth, and precious little passion, left in this house. - 60
Chicago Reader
This early-1900s costume drama surely differs from Henry James's source novel. - 50
Village Voice
Though it often wallows in louche baroque textures, The Golden Bowl is perhaps the most visually accomplished of the Ivory soaps. - 50
Charlotte Observer
Henry James' tangled, turgid prose always seems to me like a thicket of thorn trees -- so I should be grateful when somebody does the job for me on film. But I'm not - at least, in the case of The Golden Bowl.
