Director Meg Richman has tried, as others have tried, to convert a Henry James literary work into a compelling movie, but falls far short, as others have before her (see 'Wings of the Dove,' 'The Bostonians,' 'The Ambassadors,' 'Portrait of a Lady,' and 'Daisy Miller').<br /><br />James's novels and novellas, based on the late-Victorian age of social suffocation (most often visited upon women yearning to be free), are ponderous and often very depressing examinations of love, deceit, devotion, recklessness, human folly. The list goes on and on. If it's about the strictures of human emotion, James is your man. His great strength in print is his weakness when transmitted to the screen: he conducts painstaking examinations of humanity's inner self, and is a challenge to read. Those who try to adapt his films (and try to be faithful to them) tend to sink under the weight of his relentless psychological questions. <br /><br />'In the Shadows,' AKA 'Under Heaven' and 'In the Garden,' is at least a two-hankie drama that is based on 'Wings of the Dove.' It is partially effective, but it ultimately becomes basically yet another one of them thar soap opries, replete with hokey dialogue.<br /><br />If you watch the theatrical trailer for this film, you'd think you were going to watch something entirely different. The trailer suggests a hot-blooded, scandalous examination of secret sex and intrigue. In other words, as so often happens, the distributors must have decided the flick needed more 'juice,' more 'edge' when no such 'juice' or 'edge' existed. We know going in what is going to happen in this movie, and any number of sensation-making trailers will not change things.<br /><br />Molly Parker as Cynthia and Aden Young as Buck give surprisingly good performances as lovers who are transformed by a series of sad events. But I was really surprised by Joely Richardson's performance. She is a classically trained actor, but she seems to be miscast in this movie. She seems indifferent to her part (for good reason it seems to me), and speaks her lines with a flatness that is almost comical. "This love is strong," she intones to Buck (Young), "stronger than cancer." Embarrassing. (Coincidentally, Richardson's real-life mother, Vanessa Redgrave, who has never given a bad cinematic performance, still had to struggle in the 1985 adaptation of James's 'The Bostonians'. It didn't work: the movie was one boring flop.)<br /><br />Richman deserves a lot of credit for trying to rework James, to try and give us a 'serious' film amidst all the popcorn crap. But to me it's a pretty lost cause. It's very hard to pull James out of the insufferable parlours of the 19th century.