Primal Fear, starring Richard Gere (a good male chauvinist role) and the great Laura Linney (a brittle role for her), is meretricious, that is, pretends to be something it is not, and is actually cheap and shoddy. It pretends to be the story of a cynical lawyer who is confronted with himself in a murder case, and this would have been interesting. But this blurb on the box is just like the title, Primal Fear—it has nothing to do with the movie, which is simply a courtroom drama with an unbelievable surprise ending. Avoid this one.
Portrait of a Lady—Like all Henry James novels, it is primarily psychological, and the major theme is the American innocent abroad among sophisticated Europeans. Thus Isabel Archer turns down three wonderful proposals of marriage in order to keep her freedom and travel around Europe, but she accepts the fourth and disastrous proposal because she simply cannot see the evil awaiting. Great acting, especially by the veteran Barbara Hershey as the evil mistress. My reservation is that Jane Campion (The Piano) interpreted Portrait of a Lady in a modern feminist way, so instead of the story of a woman’s difficult quest for freedom and learning (the book), we have someone who blunders into a marriage to an evil, dominating tyrant (the movie). Although this gives the movie energy, it deprives it of subtly. In serious ways, the book was more helpful to feminism that the movie.