Modern, Marriage

MERCHANT AND IVORY LIGHTEN UP IN LE DIVORCE

Based on Diane Johnson's Parisian comedy of manners, Le Divorce is the 25th literary adaptation from Merchant Ivory Productions; among its predecessors are A Room with a View, The Remains of the Day, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, and Howards End. While some Merchant Ivory pictures have a stifled, self-consciously literary air, Le Divorce benefits from being set in the present—no parasols!—and, like the best Merchant Ivory adaptations (to my way of thinking, that's really only A Room with a View; others will beg to differ), it teems with the lively offhand specificity of a great read. To be honest, and to risk sounding like a hack, I never wanted it to end. (Well, I would have sat through another 20 minutes or so.) Maybe, having clear-cut their way through the densest of Henry James's novels for their last film, The Golden Bowl, producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala felt liberated by Johnson's James-lite conceit; they do have a new spring in their step, as if they had just jettisoned an 80-pound backpack. Once again, as in so much of James, we have fresh-faced American girls—Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts, both delights-mixing it up with more subtle continentals, but here our heroines' bad decisions have less than grievous consequences, and even plucked flowers get parting gifts. The cast also includes Glenn Close, Sam Waterston, Stockard Channing, Thierry Lhermitte, and Leslie Caron, who has for some reason become a dead ringer for Cindy Adams. She also gets one of the movie's best lines, as a grande dame turning up her nose at a cheese course: "The Beaufort is not correct." In context, it's pretty funny. (Rating: ★★★'/$) —B.H.

B.H.