THE GOLDEN BOWL

ON THE SET

James Ivory directs Uma Thurman and Kate Beckinsale to one of Henry James's happier endings

Even James Ivory couldn't get through The Golden Bowl. "I read about 100 pages and then gave it up, like so many people," he says of Henry James's famously abstruse 1904 novel, the author's last and a real block of wood even by Jamesian standards. Having already adapted The Europeans and The Bostonians, both set in America, the director was casting about in the early 90s for one of James's more sprawling European sagas. He and his longtime collaborators, producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, settled first on The Portrait of a Lady, then on The Wings of the Dove, but soon ran afoul, respectively, of Jane Campion's and lain Softley's versions. So

Ivory picked up The Golden Bowl again. "And that time," he adds, "it stuck." As always with James, beneath the obsessive-compulsive prose flows a river of molten soap opera. Will sweet Maggie (Kate Beckinsale), married to an Italian smoothy (Jeremy Northam), wise up to the treachery of her best friend, Charlotte (Uma Thurman), who, as it happens, is also her stepmother? You can find out (assuming you yourself haven't made it past page 140) when Miramax releases the movie later this year. To Ivory's mind, "It's a piece of luck we ended up with The Golden Bowl. It has the happiest ending in James." He pauses. "Well, at least it's more positive than the other two."

BRUCE HANDY