These scenes get your attention, cover about a hundred pages of exposition from James's original text, and put his subtle and sublime exploration of freedom, love, and exploitation into a glib, anachronistic '90s context of feminist iconoclasm and empowerment. James deserves better -- and in fact he gets it before Campion is done with him. Challenged to transform James's rarefied and oblique prose into a visual and dramatic equivalent Campion succeeds with mostly stunning inspiration but occasionally flails with embarrassing cluelessness. She's aided by James's arch and illuminating dialogue -- perhaps the best from all his novels. Even the weak opening scene is redeemed by Isabel's response to Warburton's halting, self-depreciating description of his estate: "I adore a moat."

What Isabel adores more than a moat, of course, is her own nascent self-image, her liberty and the limitless possibilities offered by her youth and the world. A recent orphan taken on by her wealthy émigré uncle and her acute and charmless aunt (Shelley Winters, in an odd fusion of Queen Victoria and a Lewis Carroll character), she is adopted by her consumptive cousin Ralph (a delicately nuanced, profoundly melancholy performance by Martin Donovan, though with perhaps too much coughing), who when she refuses one of the best catches in England notes, "The world interests you, and you want to throw yourself into it." And Isabel interests him; like James himself, he wishes to be the author of her life, granting her the opportunity to fulfill her desire and imagination by persuading his dying father to leave her a fortune at his demise.

Ralph presents Isabel with the means to achieve her faith, not only covertly underwriting her life but inadvertently introducing the agents of her downfall. Madame Serena Merle (Barbara Hershey in a wrenching portrayal of ruthlessness and love) plays Schubert beautifully but plays Isabel even more subtly. She and her ex-lover, the shallow dilettante Osmond (a sibilant, reptilian John Malkovich), scheme to marry him to Isabel in order to benefit their illegitimate child, Pansy (Valentina Cervi).

Campion choreographs this dense, exquisitely plotted waltz of treachery and horrific revelation with, for the most part, breathtaking grace and clarity. Some of the imagery actually exceeds the verbal acuity of the original. Cornering Isabel in a Florentine grotto lit by scalene beams from ceiling apertures, Osmond declares his love while toying with her parasol, prefiguring the forthcoming recurrence of Schubert's Death and the Maiden on the soundtrack. In repeated scenes Isabel appears like a black stroke of ink in a pristine interior or a white flame smothered by the damask exterior light, her vivid life frozen by the brittle world she tries to embrace.

Where Campion fails, however, is in not seeing James as contemporary enough. The director's attempt to modernize Isabel instead belittles her. A significant part of the novel, Isabel's journey around the world is reduced to a gimmicky silent-cinema travelogue, and her experiences and expansion of outlook become herky-jerky tours of the pyramids intercut with sensual fantasies of Osmond. The men who pursue her, too, are cardboard figures -- apart from Warburton, her American suitor Caspar Goodwood (Viggo Mortensen) is mere dead wood, and Malkovich's one-dimensional Osmond fails to capture any of the pathos of that self-aware mediocrity and ambiguously devoted father.

With Ralph, though, and Serena, Campion does justice to the author of the novel and the authors of Isabel's destiny. Isabel's farewells to these ambivalent benefactors and betrayers are brutal, tender, and heartbreaking. In this, and in a passionate sensibility that grasps that of James without always understanding it, Campion's Portrait is worthy of both artists.