Butler's Cinema Scene

Lois Robbins, Jonathan Rhys Meyers

“THE ASPERN PAPERS” My rating: D+ 

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Not even the presence of the iconic mother/daughter acting team of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson can salvage the sodden shipwreck that is “The Aspern Papers.”

Julian Landais’ film is only the latest dramatic incarnation of Henry James’ celebrated 1888 novella (there have been a half dozen previous adaptations), but it’s such a spectacular misfire that it should scare the smart money away from future versions.

In the 1880s an American scholar comes to Venice intent on researching the life of the famed poet Jeffrey Aspern, who died 60 years earlier leaving a couple of books of devastating verse and a beautiful corpse.  Our protagonist and  narrator, unnamed in the book but here calling himself Edward Sullivan, is portrayed by an abysmally miscast Jonathan Rhys Meyers at his creepiest.

“Edward” rents quarters in the crumbling villa of the money-strapped Madame Bordereau (Redgrave), who was Aspern’s lover back in the day. The old lady is a hard, utterly unsentimental case, but Edward sees an opening in her spinster niece, Tina (Richardson).  He gets to work insinuating himself into the women’s lives, courting  the lonely, shy Tina as a way of accessing Aspern’s personal papers, a veritable treasure trove he is certain Bordereau possesses.

Joely Richardson

Almost nothing here works. The screenplay by Landais and Jean Pavans makes even James’ dialogue sound dreadful.  Their new material — much of it focusing on a catty grand dame (Lois Robbins) who becomes a backboard against which Edward  bounces his ideas — is even worse.

Huge chunks of “The Aspern Papers” play like an overwrought high school production (has Rhys Meyers ever before given this awful a performance?)

Vanessa Redgrave

They’ve seen fit to flesh out the yarn with dreamy flashbacks to the Aspern/Bordereau romance, complete with a three-way sexual relationship involving a Byronic second poet. And they even have Edward attend a decadent Venitian soiree apparently inspired by the orgy scenes in Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” (The film actually opens with a montage of writhing nude bodies…an image that would have given the sexually stuffy Henry James a coronary thrombosis.)

Very little actually works here. Redgrave is fine as the old lady and Richardson a bit better than that as Tina, who is not quite the pushover Edward assumes.  And kudos are due Philippe Guilbert’s cinematography, which so effectively captures Venice’s decaying grandeur of Venice that you can almost smell the mildew.

| Robert W. Butler