Brevitas

In a canny and largely successful appeal to the youth market, this film streamlines Henry James's notoriously dense novel and brings its melodramatic and erotic undertones to the forefront. A well-bred but impoverished English girl (Helena Bonham-Carter), secretly engaged to an equally impecunious journalist (Linus Roache), persuades her lover to pay court to a young American heiress dying of TB (Alison Elliott). The plot thickens as the three take a pleasure trip to Venice. The scenes in Italy are lovely, and the three stars give superb performances--especially Bonham-Carter, who brilliantly captures the complexities of her character.