Where Angels Fear to Tread

A few weeks ago I posited that E.M. Forster may be the novelist most well-treated by cinematic adaptations, but that was before seeing Where Angels Fear to Tread, directed by Charles Sturridge, and released in 1991. It is an example of the kind of stuffy British cinema that can make those who like their movies full of explosions roll their eyes--lots of tea drinking, women wearing their hair up, and an actor named Rupert.

Perhaps the Merchant Ivory team avoided this novel because it wasn't as good or easily adapted, but Sturridge (who directed the well-respected TV version of Brideshead Revisited) took it on. As with A Room With a View, this film deals with the contrast of England and Italy, seeing the latter country as an exotic place that awakens the slumbering spirits of the frosty Brits. Helen Mirren is Lilia, a widow who, as the film begins, heads for Italy, along with a chaperon (Helena Bonham Carter, a specialist in Forster adaptations). She is happy to get away, as she lives with the family of her dead husband, and they are a cold, reproving bunch. While in Italy she meets and falls in love with a younger Italian man, and her brother-in-law, Rupert Graves, is dispatched to stop the union. He is too late, though.

Mirren eventually becomes pregnant and dies in childbirth, leaving the son to her husband. The family back in England tut-tuts about this, but has no interest in the baby. But when Bonham Cater, the daughter of a vicar, goes to Italy to rescue the baby from being brought up non-English, Graves returns, along with his sister, Judy Davis, to attempt to secure the child, not out of any familial feeling, but so the family doesn't lose the moral high ground.

Of course all of this is unseemly. Davis, in particular, has it bad (she was also a Forster vet, so good in A Passage to India). I think she's one of the finest film actresses working today, but she is given a thankless role--a spinster who is wound so tight that she is ready to burst. There is nothing for Davis to do with this role but flounder, particularly in a scene where she attends an Italian opera and tries to shush patrons while they are shouting "bravas" to the diva. It's interesting to note that it was also this year that she gave a far different performance in Naked Lunch. Graves has a more interesting character to play. He is an uppercrust Englishman, full of prejudices, but he is also swayed by the sun and splendor of Tuscany. It his growth as a character that is the spine of the action.

Bonham Carter, who has long been typecast in roles that put her in a corset and hatpins, also has trouble with her character. I was never quite sure where she was coming from. It's a dour, listless performance, driven by the script. It is her action that carries the plot forward, but it's an action that is unaccountable for on the screen, so the audience can only be bewildered. Perhaps the class divisions of the time made it much more relevant to audiences at the time. Today, it's hard to see why a baby growing up Italian would be a bad thing.