‘Aspern’: Plenty of pedigree, little passion

Much talk, scarce action in James adaptation

It’s useful to know a few things about “The Aspern Papers” going in:

For instance, the movie is based on an 1888 novella by Henry James, about a man obsessed with obtaining a secret cache of love letters from a poet who died tragically young. It stars the great Vanessa Redgrave as the woman who zealously guards those letters; Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the man who zealously seeks them; and Redgraves daughter Joely Richardson as the poor soul caught between them.

It was co-produced by James Ivory, whose résumé includes directing credits on such sterling literary adaptations as “A Room with a View” and a producing credit for “Call Me By Your Name.” And it has been adapted many, many times before – for film, television, opera, radio and the stage. (This version, as it happens, was co-written by Jean Pavans, based on his 2002 French play, “Les Papiers d’Aspern,” along with Hannah Bhuiya and director Julien Landais.)

What all that tells you is that the film is smart, literary, nuanced, slightly stagy – and pedigreed to within an inch of its life. It practically reeks of dusty, yellowed pages and engraved-leather bookbinding.

What this almost certainly does not guarantee is a rollicking good time, even by the constrained standards of such deeply internalized material, which, like many films of its ilk, is more about psychological character than plot. There is much talking done here, but – despite some racy flashbacks – precious little action.

What else would you expect from a story whose theme of thwarted desire is succinctly summed up by the line: “What we want doesn’t matter. What matters is what we get.”

That epigrammatic zinger is delivered by the character of Tina (Richardson), who opens the door to her palatial home in Venice one day to find a gentleman caller, played by Rhys Meyers in an impersonation of a human being (but actually something closer to an unscrupulous robot with good manners). Introducing himself as a writer named Edward Sullivan – a pseudonym, we later learn – he rents out rooms in the home that Tina shares with her elderly aunt Juliana (Redgrave), who was once the lover of the late, great poet Jeffrey Aspern. (That title character, seen only in flashback, is based on Percy Bysshe Shelley.)

In fact, the film opens with a pro- logue replicating, almost exactly, Louis Édouard Fournier’s painting “The Funeral of Shelley.” The character of Juliana is said to be based on Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Shelley’s wife, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. )

Before long, it becomes clear that Edward – or, rather, Morton, as everyone else calls him – has a coldly calculating ulterior motive: A literary biographer and critic, Morton wants to get his hands on letters written by Aspern to Juliana some 60 years ago, letters that might reveal some prurient secret about their author, if the film’s many flashbacks to writhing threesomes are to be believed.

Morton’s deception, which also involves leading Tina on romantically in that hope that she might persuade her aunt to let him read the old letters, seems somewhat odd, given the ultimate silliness of the “mystery” surrounding them and the slightness of whatever literary insights they contain.

But the point of James’ story, and of the film, was never to lay bare an old scandal. Rather, it is to drive home a message that might seem obvious to anyone who has lived long enough to know that happy endings are for Hollywood: Life is not fair, and the kind of passion that endures is best looked for – and found – in poetry.