Critics reviews

The Portrait of a Lady is a fascinating outlier in the historical dramas of ’90s Hollywood. The corsets and longing glances are all there, but Campion imbues her film with anachronistic twists and narrative shifts that apparently upset the James purists.

[The Portrait of a Lady] breaks new ground in a myriad of ways... Campion not only translates the novel into a sumptuous, florid drama that’s committed to the female gaze but also splices it with scenes of her own modern or surreal interpretations of the text

Campion balances the heat of desire through restraint and a certain coldness built through her use of widescreen and symbolism; a cracked cup and a rippling canvas hold so much weight in building the tense atmosphere of the social performance. Osmond, as an artist, seeks to form the women around him into living works of art. Kidman fits this role beautifully, as she already looks like a great painting by John Singer Sargent, and transcending ego, she cries until her face turns red and swollen.

[The Portrait of a Lady] is as cinematically intelligent as it is faithful to the original [source text]... Besides the uniformly fine performances, what makes the film so rewarding - and challenging - is its refusal to soften or sentimentalise James' study of New World innocence unprotected against Old World experience.

Rather than a Filmed Classic, Campion embarks on a trickier but more daring project of mounting a particular reading of James' story. Her conception of Isabel, her experiences, and her decisions are refracted through 100 years of both our literary acquaintance with James' Isabel and of the emergence of female/feminist voices in society.

[The Portrait of a Lady] perplexes as much as it fascinates... We see too little of the searing intelligence that has earned Isabel so many admirers and, likewise, we also see too little of the internal fire that lures Isabel to the viperous Osmond. In a movie marked by outstanding performances, Malkovich is the one weak link.

The film makes _brilliant_ use of James – and not just brilliant, but thrilling, challenging, aggravating, and intensely moving use.

As Raging Bull is to Martin Scorsese, Portrait of a Lady is to Jane Campion. Masterworks by filmmakers at the top of their game, each is a study in masochism as the internalization of social currents and riptides one navigates in claiming a sexual identity.

With startling intuitiveness, Ms. Campion traces the tension between polite, guarded characters and blunt visual symbols of their inner turmoil.

Largely manages to recast James’s exquisitely wrought prose, his interior epiphanies and apocalypses, into dialogue, images, and performances that explode in slowest, utterly devastating motion. Like James’s hard reads, this brilliant, difficult film demands close concentration and committed effort on the viewer’s part. The novel’s central metaphors... are authentically animated, without cinematic disguise or distortion, on Campion’s canvas.

[The Portrait of a Lady] emerges as a literary adaptation of exceeding intelligence, beauty and concentrated artistry, but one that remains emotionally remote and perhaps unavoidably problematic dramatically.