
Washington Square. 1997. Directed by Agnieszka Holland. Screenplay by Carol Doyle. With Jennifer Jason Leigh, Albert Finney, Maggie Smith. 115 min.
“Baltimore stands in for Manhattan in the 1830s—specifically, for Washington Square North, with its row of red-brick upper-middle-class homes overlooking the park. Agnieszka Holland’s adaptation of Henry James’s novel is far more scathing than The Heiress, William Wyler’s subdued 1939 version. Anchored by Jennifer Jason Leigh’s extraordinary performance as Catherine Sloper, the film zeros in on the source of patriarchal power: money, to be sure, but more crucially the refusal to value women, whether mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers, wives, or friends, as autonomous human beings. Leigh has always been a boldly physical actor, but here her ability to make Catherine’s inner life transparent gives the film a complexity that more than equals the novel. Having experienced the rejection of both her father and the man she loves, she turns the tables by refusing them what they want most: to control her life” (Amy Taubin).