They got it right

Helena Bonham Carter is the festival's Excellence Award winner

by Jeffrey Gantz

The 13th annual Boston Film Festival will present its Boston Film Excellence Award to an actress who has indeed been excellent in some dozen movies. Helena Bonham Carter -- whom you can catch in the festival's screening of The Wings of the Dove -- is barely 30, so you could hardly call this a lifetime-achievement award. Still, she has a list of credits that would grace the résumé of many a distinguished older performer. She's appeared in two adaptations of Shakespeare and four Merchant/Ivory versions of E.M. Forster. She's played a disciple of St. Francis, she's been the queen of England, and her directors have included Kenneth Branagh, James Ivory, Franco Zeffirelli, and Trevor Nunn. It hasn't all been cakes and ale: she's been whipped and beheaded and drowned and had her heart torn out. She's even played Woody Allen's wife.

Her major film career began just 12 years ago, and in spectacular fashion, in the title role of Trevor Nunn's handsome if sentimental celebration Lady Jane (1985). Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII's youngest sister, was upon the death of Edward VI, in 1553, maneuvered onto the throne of England, where at the age of 15 she ruled for nine days before being deposed in favor of Henry's daughter Mary; the following year she and her equally young husband were beheaded. Bonham Carter barely looks old enough to play Jane (her adolescent slump is perfect), but already she shows her characteristic combination of iron and velvet, standing up to her parents (Patrick Stewart plays her father) and to the most powerful men in England (at one point she says to John Dudley, "Are you asking me to lie?") even as she grows playful and coquettish with her initially unwanted husband. Once the new couple discover sex, their relationship deteriorates into puppy love and Nunn turns them into martyrs.

But that internal conflict between sense and sensuality were ideal for the three Forster roles that made Bonham Carter a star. (Her part in the 1987 film Maurice is a cameo; as a bored cricket spectator, she has three lines and is on screen for about 10 seconds.) Both A Room with a View (1986) and Where Angels Fear To Tread (1991) find Forster weighing England against Italy, duty against freedom, principle against pleasure, tradition against feeling. Bonham Carter's Lucy Honeychurch breaks out when she dumps priggish fiancé Cecil (Daniel Day Lewis) for the D.H. Laurentian George (Julian Sands). Her Caroline Abbott does the same by falling for Gino Carella -- but it's more than that, she understands Italy, whereas Philip Herriton (an engaging Rupert Graves) has just a glimmer and his sister Harriet (a superbly repressed Judy Davis) none at all. When Caroline faints and Gino offers her a glass of wine, she refuses out of principle and almost in the same breath takes it. Not England or Italy but, somehow, both. And more than anyone else in these films she speaks for Forster.

Merchant and Ivory weaken the enigmatic ending of Angels by allowing Caroline to hint to Philip that if she ever gets over Gino, she might consider him -- but he, too, has begun to understand, and it's an extraordinarily moving final shot as Bonham Carter and Graves embrace on the train-station platform. No one goes to Italy in Howards End (1992), but the sensibility is represented by the Schlegel sisters, Margaret (Emma Thompson, magnificent as usual) and Helen (Bonham Carter) -- mostly Helen, who's the most caring person in the film, the one who, as Forster would say, makes the connections. Yet she's also the most selfish. She's the one who thinks of Leonard, but once he's dead she forgets him and thinks only of their child. Helen sums up Bonham Carter's Forster roles in something she says to Leonard when he comes to the Schlegels' for tea: "We're not odd, really -- we're just over-expressive."

Meanwhile she played neurotic bulimic Lady Minerva Munday in the coming-of-age Brit comedy Getting It Right (1989), in which 31-year-old Jesse Birdsall finds himself caught between Bonham Carter's screwball and older woman Lynn Redgrave before finally getting it right with single mom Jane Horrocks. She's a restrained Ophelia opposite Mel Gibson (whose histrionics give her little room) in Franco Zeffirelli's voyeur fest of a Hamlet (1990); in her mad scene, on the other hand, she's a little over-the-top -- but what else could Ophelia be in a Zeffirelli adaptation?

She had even less luck in two subsequent efforts, as Elizabeth Lavenza (Victor's fiancée) in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) and as Amanda Sloane (Woody Allen's wife), in Mighty Aphrodite (1995) Elizabeth has little to do in any Frankenstein besides looking anxious and frustrated, and then horror-struck as the monster rips her heart out; for all that it has Kenneth Branagh directing and starring as Victor, and Robert De Niro as the monster, this is generic horror. Mira Sorvino got the plum role in the enjoyable Mighty Aphrodite; Bonham Carter's WASPy art-gallery owner is ill-conceived and colorless. Still, to play Woody's faithful (despite being tempted by Peter Weller), loving wife for two hours is proof positive that you can act.

Two movies that turned up in last year's Boston Film Festival find her back on track. In Margaret's Museum (1996) she's the daughter in a Cape Breton mining family (Helen Mirren is her embittered mother) who weds a bagpipe-playing former miner (Clive Russell). We get some unusually mature (for the cinema) scenes of tough married love, and Bonham Carter shows off a nifty country Cape Breton twang (not to mention the kind of vocabulary you don't hear in Merchant/Ivory films) before the movie turns gothic and, at the end, gives in to self-pity. Twelfth Night (1996) reunites her with Trevor Nunn, and though Olivia traditionally plays second fiddle to Viola, Bonham Carter is so spontaneous and responsive to Cesario/Sebastian, so sisterly and yet seductive, she all but steals the film from the excellent Imogen Stubbs.

Now, in Iain Softley's adaptation of The Wings of the Dove, she has another "second" role: if Milly Theale is the novel's dove, Kate Croy -- Bonham Carter's part -- is more like its hawk. Yet her ability to say everything in a glance, or a word, is perfect for Henry James; if she can do for him what she did for Forster, we may have a second set of masterpieces to look forward to.