MISPLACED AFFECTIONS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Close your eyes and you'd swear you were listening to Montgomery Clift. Open them, however, and all you have is Ben Chaplin, the young British actor, who may be able to match the indolent flatness of Clift's voice, but lacks the sinuous ambiguity Clift brought to the role of fortune-hunting Morris Townsend in the 1949 movie The Heiress.

That's pretty much how things go in this new adaptation of Washington Square. It reverts to the original title of Henry James' novel about repression and repressiveness among the monied classes of 19th century New York City. But in every other aspect it's a little more--sometimes a lot more--blatant than it needs to be.

Take, for example, Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance as Catherine Sloper, the shy and awkward young woman whose wealth Townsend is stalking. Does she really have to keep dropping objects and walking into walls to prove her social and physical ineptitude? And what about Albert Finney as her father, at once contemptuous and overprotective of her? He's a constantly rumbling volcano ever on the verge of eruption. One keeps recalling, much to Finney's disadvantage, the icier malevolence of Ralph Richardson in the earlier movie. On the other hand, Maggie Smith's Aunt Penny, more in love with Morris than her niece is and frantically trying to wnegotiate a truce between the principals, is all twitters and twitches, a parody of social insecurity.

They are all, God knows, energetic, and their never-a-dull-moment playing commands our astonished attention. You almost feel that if you let it wander for an instant, someone would reach out from the screen and slam you with a two-by-four. At the same time, you are aware that they are shoving this melodrama of class and manners uncomfortably close to farce and robbing the story's ending of its quietly stated force.

It's hard to say what went wrong. Possibly the director, Agnieszka Holland, was simply overwhelmed by these very potent performers, unable to discipline their work. Possibly the fact that English is her second language (she is Polish and the creator of the very powerful Europa Europa) rendered her impervious to, or nervous about, Jamesian nuance.

But one suspects another kind of anxiety was at work here--the '90s notion, endemic among studio types, that audiences no longer have the patience to endure subtle, psychologically indirect interchanges between characters or delicate exfoliations of complex relationships. Producers want the bragging rights that come with classy literary adaptations--especially as the awards season looms. They also want to make movies about figures like Catherine, who can be seen as both feminist victim and, once she gets a grip on her emotions, feminist heroine. But they don't want to pay the price for these desires: embracing the intricacies and ambiguities of their sources.

--By Richard Schickel