Poor Madeleine Potter. She's a faith healer's daughter in 1875 Boston, a speaker for the woman's movement, and everybody wants a piece of her. Her father, Wesley Addy, puts her on display at meetings and rakes in the shekels. Vanessa Redgrave, ardent feminist avant la lettre, wants to use her as a poster girl and also, maybe, bestow on her in muted form some of the love that dare not speak its name. The manly, mustachioed Christopher Reeve wants her for his own and would like to run away with her and turn her into a much-loved icon of delicate femininity who has nothing to say.I had the advantage of never having read the novel so I can only comment on the raw film. It's a typical Merchant-Ivory movie -- tasteful, lavish, accurate to the period, and marvelously photographed. Some of the images at the Massachusetts beach are Winslow Homerish.The plot is really too complicated and too subtle to describe in detail. It boils down to whether Madeleine Potter wants to represent a social cause or become a Southerner's housewife. It sounds worse than it is. The viewer is tempted to jump in with both feet because sexism is currently a social issue. That would turn Reeve into the domineering villain and Redgrave into a paragon of virtue.I saw it less as a question of right and wrong than a clash of the two most prominent cultures on which the country was founded. The intolerant, profoundly religious, fiercely democratic New England Yankees and the aristocratic, gentile, highly stratified, caste-ridden, proud society of Southern planters. We've been fighting this same civil war since the Puritans landed in the Bay Colony and the cavaliers settled in Virginia.Of course it's not THAT simple. Nothing is really simple. Reeve evidently loves Potter to distraction. Yet he's pushy too. Pushy even by the standards of today. He's a Mississippian, a veteran, a lawyer, who has migrated to New York. But he's not successful. His essays are routinely rejected by publishers who tell him his views are three hundred years out of date. We can imagine what those views are. When some elderly lady remarks that her experiences in the South weren't very pleasant, Reeve replies that it may have had something to do with her attempt to improve the lot of the "Nigra". And when Potter takes him to visit a hall at Harvard lined with the names of the Union dead, watch Reeve's expression.Best performances aren't by the two lovers, but by Vanessa Redgrave, Jessica Tandy, Linda Hunt, and an ashen Wesley Addy with a crazy fright wig. Nancy Marchand is fine too. She was my co-star in the magnificent art house piece, "From the Hip." I helped the kid get over the rough spots in her performance.Anyway, the film didn't strike me as so bad as some reviewers have made it out to be. It flows smoothly along. It would have flowed more smoothly if Reeve had been booted out of the picture half-way through, but then there would have been no picture.

Women of Boston committed to the suffrage movement on shown in a picture which resembles the Seneca Falls Convention Meeting of Women in 1848 with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others participating. The film belonged in 1848. It is thoroughly boring.The late Chris Reeves was horribly miscast as a Mississippi attorney up from the south who falls in love with one of the suffragettes. In the way, is the dedicated leader, played by Vanessa Redgrave, who wants the woman to remain in the movement. Anyone who marries from her thinking can't be totally committed. The fact that there is a lesbian situation going on between the two women supposedly doesn't enter into her thinking. Right.Co-star Jessica Tandy is made up to look like Cady Stanton.The ending where Redgrave makes her passioned speech for the movement after the other lady runs off with Reeve is too late. When the latter didn't speak, most of the people left the auditorium. This is what movie viewers should have done as well.

Henry James has not been an easy author to bring to the screen. The Heiress has been one glorious exception and even with the fine production values that Merchant/Ivory brought to The Bostonians it still doesn't quite measure up to The Heiress in glorious black and white.That being said The Bostonians is great window on the world of Henry James and the upper class society in which he moved in New York and Boston. James was a great evaluator of human nature even of the love that dare not speak its name.Stripped of all the trimmings about the emerging women's movement what we've got here is a triangle with a lesbian twist. Vanessa Redgrave got an Oscar nomination for Best Actress with her portrayal as an intellectual leader who feels she hasn't the voice to articulate the issues surrounding suffrage and all the other inequalities women endured back then. She latches on to a protégé in the person of Madeline Potter recently shilling for her faith healer father Wesley Addy. What she cannot, dare not articulate is the physical attraction she's feeling for Potter.Redgrave is simply marvelous as the frustrated, possibly even latent lesbian. We're never sure if she has or will ever consummate her feelings. This is Boston of the 1870s-1880s where such things are frowned there even more than most places in the USA. Vanessa's rival for Potter is Christopher Reeve a devilishly handsome young blade from the south who has come north to seek his fortune as a lawyer. As for Potter she's not sure of what she wants or even that Redgrave's interest in her is more than politics.Linda Hunt and Jessica Tandy have a pair of good roles, The Bostonians is great in terms of roles for women. Tandy is an aged old soul who rejoices in the changes in America she's seen in the 19th century of which she remembers most of. Hunt is her nurse/companion who is a shrewd observer of the events around her and Tandy.The Bostonians also got a nomination for Costume Design and the shooting in Boston and New York are fine. Boston has kept a lot of the same look Henry James knew in certain areas of the city and James Ivory made great use of Central Park in New York and some of the structures there that were put up in the time of Henry James.I won't say what happens other than to say that Vanessa Redgrave does find it in herself to articulate her cause. As for the rest you have to watch this very fine production to find out.

I just finished reading Henry James' "The Bostonians," and though I found the book to be a fine read and rather effective in capturing the many waves of emotion that flow through its often unappealing characters, I can't say I was taken much with its mean-spirited and narrow satire. This three-sided love story involving a feminist spinster, her rather dim protégée and a Southern knucklehead (I'm simplifying wildly here) involved me more than it should have, yet it left a bad the taste in my mouth. What is one to make of a tale in which two of the most vulnerable characters are left wounded by the "hero" (Olive Chancellor in the present, Verena Tarrant in the future) and noble ideals are trounced by bigotry, brutism and misogyny? The author's phobic attitude toward the "Boston Marriage" of the two heroines seems to mirror that of the southern chauvinist Basil Ransom (which is offputting) and the book never quite recovers from thoroughly humanizing the doomed females while setting them up to be trounced by the Great White Male. Given that I found the book to have such objectionable themes, I probably should have stayed away from the film, but since movies have a long history of "free adaptations" of novels, I though that perhaps the film version of "The Bostonians" might give some form and direction to James' sometimes overwritten, anti-feminist jeremiad.Well, I should have left well enough alone. The film is slavishly faithful to the book in all the wrong ways – LOTS of talking, VERY leisurely –and never manages to improve upon its flaws. Vanessa Redgrave is rather remarkable, as is Linda Hunt, but everybody else comes off sorely lacking, especially poor Christopher Reeve who tries to be dashing but makes Ransom even more odious than in the book (which I didn't think possible). Scenes start and end with so little dramatic flow -or sense- that I really wonder what I would have made of the film had I not read the book (I don't think any of the behaviors of the characters would have made the least bit of sense). Though a weak attempt is made to make the ending less sexist than in the book, it's a case of too little, too late. "The Bostonians" still remains a politically offensive minor effort easily overlooked because it also commits the crime of being dull.