'' The Golden Bowl '' received mixed to positive reviews ; it currently holds a 53 % rating on Rotten Tomatoes ; the consensus states : " Coming from the Merchant – Ivory team , '' The Golden Bowl '' is visually stunning , but the filmmakers have difficulty in transporting the characterizations of the Henry James novel to the screen . " '' The New York Times '' observed , " In translating the novel into a film , the producer Ismail Merchant , his directing partner , James Ivory , and their favorite screenwriter , Ruth Prawer Jhabvala , have made a movie that 's an ambitious , profoundly ambiguous statement about their own passion for the cultivated , high-culture sensibility epitomized by James and E. M. Forster , as opposed to the cruder mass culture that has eclipsed these literary heroes . . . Much of the dialogue in Ms. Jhabvala 's carefully wrought screenplay voices feelings that remain unspoken in the novel , and this is the movie 's biggest problem . No matter how well the characters ' thoughts have been translated into speech , the act of compressing their rich , complex inner lives into dialogue without resorting to voice-over narration inevitably tends to cheapen them and turn a drama about the revelation of hidden truths into the terser , more commonplace language of an intelligent soap opera . " Roger Ebert of the '' Chicago Sun-Times '' observed , " I admired this movie . It kept me at arm 's length , but that is where I am supposed to be ; the characters are after all at arm 's length from each other , and the tragedy of the story is implied but never spoken aloud . It will help , I think , to be familiar with the novel , or to make a leap of sympathy with the characters . " Edward Guthmann of the '' San Francisco Chronicle '' called the film " impeccably mounted , nicely scored and beautifully written " and noted , " Charlotte was n't the principal character in James ' 1904 novel . . . but in the film version . . . she takes center stage . Played by the long-necked Uma Thurman , she 's less vixen than ninny - a smooth operator whose maneuvers seem to issue not from shrewdness or intelligence but from a microchip that allows her to robotically spout her lines with careful inflection . It 's a blunder of a performance , and makes the viewer wish that Ivory had cast a more accomplished actress - Kate Winslet , perhaps , or Cate Blanchett - who could give dimension to the character and indicate subtext in a way that Thurman ca n't . " Mike Clark of '' USA Today '' rated the film two out of four stars and commented , " Too many dialogue exchanges sound like actors reading lines , and even the film 's better performers seem to be acting in a vacuum . The movie establishes good will ( or even great will ) in the initial scenes because it 's so gorgeous , but the rest is such a slog that even the revealed significance of the title artifact elicits a shrug . " Emanuel Levy of '' Variety '' called the film " vastly uneven , with some wonderful period touches but also more than a few tedious moments , " " tasteful , diffident and decorous , " and " a deliberately paced literary film that takes too long to build narrative momentum and explore its central dramatic conflicts . " He added , " James ' deft portrait of human frailty and his experimentation in narrative mode only intermittently find vivid expression in the work of Ivory and screenwriter Prawer Jhabvala . Everything in the film , particularly in the last reel , is spelled out in an explicit , literal manner . . . Production values , particularly Andrew Sanders ' design and John Bright 's costumes , are exquisite , but they decorate a film that 's too slow and only sporadically involving . " James Ivory was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival . Production designer Andrew Sanders won the '' Evening Standard '' British Film Award for Best Technical/Artistic Achievement
2000 Cannes Film Festival
2000 Cannes Film Festival
The Golden Bowl (film)