1999

From Movieline:

HELENA BONHAM CARTER, A ROOM WITH A VIEW

by Michael Atkinson

Helena Bonham Carter has been doing the bustle-and-parasol thing for over a decade now, and although her Oscar nomination for last year's The Wings of the Dove would argue that the years have seen an evolution in the quality of her period performances, for my money A Room with a View, from way back in 1986, remains her most unforgettable. This is the movie that started the Bantam Classics-on-film boom, and no film since has matched its romantic flush or its beguiling good humor, both of which owe a great deal to Bonham Carter's bristly smart, vibrantly responsive and often very funny performance as a young turn-of-the-century maiden trying to reconcile her internal impulse to exert control over her life with the hilariously loopy world around her.

Bonham Carter's ability to look and move like an early 20th-century virgin is so uncannily convincing that her portrayal of Lucy Honeychurch outclasses the work of even a genre stalwart like Emma Thompson. As we follow Lucy from her chaperoned holiday in Florence to her manor house in Surrey, we are never sure what's going on inside her--which is the point, since she's so busy managing the struggle between her head and her heart that she doesn't quite know herself. When she meets her appealingly eccentric soul mate, George (Julian Sands), in Florence, she is practically the only one who fails to recognize their inevitable rightness for each other. Lucy is unconsciously charmed by George, but she coolly rebuffs him, since she is already spoken for by the prissy Daniel Day-Lewis (in a great early performance). With Bonham Carter there's none of that dreadful cuing actors indulge in to make sure we understand what they're thinking--she simply allows Lucy to exist in the moment. When Lucy's secret, impulsive self surfaces--with a raw belly laugh at seeing a portly reverend skinny-dip, in the flirty chat she has with a hunky Italian coachman and in the comically tough boxer's stride she walks with when she's in a pique--it's fresh and unexpected; it hasn't been telegraphed beforehand. And because you can't predict her, Bonham Carter makes the restrained tea parties throb.

What makes Lucy, and this film, so compulsively watchable is the endless flow of charming details Bonham Carter builds into her portrayal--Lucy's double take in a Florentine museum when in mid-conversation she spots Sands falling to his knees in sudden prayer, her little-girl's scowl at Day-Lewis as he breaks all land speed snobbery records, her smiles at odd moments as the film's supporting cast jabbers around her, even the very first glimpse we have of her as she opens her pensione shutters to a view of a Florentine alley and registers 18 varieties of disappointment, haughtiness and warmth with barely a half-flutter of her eyelids. By providing Lucy with hints of more dimensions and moods than we're allowed to see fully, Bonham Carter keeps us alert and aroused as no one has in a period drama since. Without her, A Room with a View would have been merely a "Masterpiece Theater" litany of ripe character actors spouting the king's English. With her, it breathes like a newlywed on honeymoon.