ALL HAIL TO HELENA!

By RICHARD CORLISS

No one fires a gun or slashes a victim to slivers in The Wings of the Dove, the sexy, spectral new film from Henry James' novel. But mortal predators are at work, and their weapons are smiles, thin and precise as stilettos. The smile of smarmy Lord Mark (Alex Jennings) says, "He's boring" or "Her money is too new" or, late at night when he's drunk too much, "You'll do." His friend Maude (Charlotte Rampling) has a practiced irony in her smile; life has taught her to walk gracefully among land mines and, en route, to plant a few. The smile of journalist Merton Densher (Linus Roache) carries a soft ruefulness, something that understands failure. And in the smile of Maude's niece Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter), there is a sly gravity, a love of intrigue for revenge or profit. Kate is up to some serious mischief.

We expect no less of Bonham Carter, who has been a source of posh insolence since her 1985 screen debut as the teen-age Queen of England in Lady Jane. She is our modern antique goddess--a balky Ophelia, for instance, to Mel Gibson's Hamlet. But it is in the early 20th century that her sweet imperiousness has been put to smartest use; she has made no fewer than four films based on E.M. Forster novels (A Room with a View, Maurice, Where Angels Fear to Tread and Howards End). She finds the age attractive--"Women tend to be the protagonists," she notes, "not the ornamental love interest"--and the age returns the favor. If Edwardian England hadn't existed, James Ivory might have had to invent it for her.

From Forster to James might be just a move from one Eaton Square town house to another. When The Wings of the Dove was offered, she thought, "Oh, not another costume drama--and in the period that I've done to death." True, but Kate, who prods her lover Merton to woo dying American heiress Millie Theale (Alison Elliott), is a more complex lady of breeding. She and Merton recall two other devious Europeans, also out to fleece a rich American girl, in James' The Portrait of a Lady. Here, though, the best role and much of the rooting interest go to the schemer.

"I'm not good at being impulsive," Kate says. She needs time to spin her webs around those, like Maude and Mark, who would entrap her. She is good at duplicity--so good it becomes a habit. Thus she works it on Merton, the sort of weak, handsome man strong women are attracted to and know how to use. Millie, with one of those wilting diseases peculiar to heroines of romantic novels, has no such guile. Imperiled innocence is her lure for Merton, and it may draw him beyond the reach of Kate's conniving.

"It is a demanding role," says Iain Softley, the film's director, "because Kate does dark things and yet she has to be sympathetic." At 31, Bonham Carter is up to the challenge, physically and technically. She is, for a start, fully ravishing now. Her dramatic coloring--black eyes, ivory skin--is splashed on a tauter canvas. Maturity has made her chipmunk cheeks swankly concave, allowing her, as Kate, to mull her plotting as if it were a fine port. Bonham Carter has always had the intense stare of a schoolgirl over her maths, but now her face is filled with midnight radiance. Without raising her voice, she suggests that Kate has a passion of near tragic scope. It is the dilemma of a clever woman whose career, in a prefeminist society, can only be one of sexual intrigue.

An actress has no such limitations on her roles, but Bonham Carter was always one for intrigue. In secondary school she announced that she wanted to be a spy--because she loved Charlie's Angels. "It was about being someone else," she says. "Acting is a natural extension of that: being liberated by putting on a mask."

Being a Bonham Carter might seem enough, for her family story is one of distinction and poignant drama. Her great-grandfather H.H. Asquith was Prime Minister in the very years (1908-16) when so many of her films are set. Her father, a Harvard business school graduate, was a successful banker until, after an operation for a benign brain tumor, he suffered a paralyzing stroke. Helena has her looks from her mother, a psychotherapist of Franco-Spanish-Austro-Russian-Jewish ancestry. She lived with her parents until she was 30, when she bought an apartment a few minutes from their London home. "I'm not stretching the umbilical cord very far."

Accepted at Cambridge University, Bonham Carter decided to pursue acting full time. She had made Lady Jane when she was 18 with, she says, "the confidence that comes from complete ignorance." By her next film, A Room with a View, she had learned how much she didn't know. "I was always asking, 'What am I doing here?' But then I'm my own worst judge--I'm indulgently self-critical. I came out of the first screening of The Wings of the Dove depressed and inconsolable. My mother had to remind me that that's my response to everything that I do."

Bonham Carter's career has not lingered exclusively in Edwardiana; curiosity drives her into many movie landscapes. She is splendid as the impatient girlfriend of penniless poet Richard E. Grant in a lovely new film of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. She has played Marina Oswald (the TV movie Fatal Deception), Woody Allen's selfish wife (in Mighty Aphrodite), Sister Clare to Mickey Rourke's Francis of Assisi (no, really, in the 1989 Francesco), a French-speaking fashion designer (Portraits Chinois), a bachelor-party stripper (the BBC's Dancing Queen) and a scrubwoman who lops off vital parts of her deceased loved ones--tongue, lungs, finger, penis--as a protest against mining conditions in Nova Scotia (Margaret's Museum).

To make this last film, she declined Lars von Trier's offer of the lead role in Breaking the Waves, which earned Emily Watson an Oscar nomination as the simple Scottish girl who wills her paraplegic husband back to health. "Having lived with a father who was crippled for 17 years," Bonham Carter says, "I didn't buy the miracle at the end. It was a tough decision." She doesn't regret it. "I couldn't have done it. Emily Watson is much better than I would have been."

She won't be going Hollywood anytime soon; Los Angeles spooks her. "I don't have the legs or the body," she says. "When I went there, I always felt to be the freak." But if there's any justice, she may have to go again: to sit in an aisle seat on Oscar night. A nomination for The Wings of the Dove might bring to that thoughtful, seductive face the least complicated smile it has ever worn.

--Reported by Barry Hillenbrand/London