Agnieszka Holland's new movie "Washington Square'' makes of this situation a sad story about a young woman named Catherine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who spends much of her life seeking the love of two men who do not deserve it. (The story was also filmed in 1949 as "The Heiress.'') Catherine's father, the wealthy Dr. Austin Sloper (Albert Finney) resents her because his wife died giving birth to her. Her suitor, Morris Townsend (Ben Chaplin), likes her well enough if she comes with her father's money, but not so well otherwise. Her challenge is to find some measure of self-respect in a life where everyone seems to value her because of someone else's accomplishments.
Her father is an orotund monster who demands, and even receives, the love and obedience of his daughter. He sees her as a loyal helpmate, waiting with tea when he returns from work, content to spend the rest of her days as her father's meek little companion. Her lover is poor, must marry money or make it, and knows which course he prefers, although he is handsome and agreeable enough to feel his "attributes'' are the equal of her own.
And the girl? "I've never thought of her as delightful and charming,'' the doctor says on one occasion, astonished that anyone else should. He is capable of astonishing cruelty, as when he tells her, "How obscene that your mother should give her life so that you can inhabit space on this earth.'' She is so intimidated that when asked, as a little girl, to give a recital for her father's friends, she can do no more than pee on the floor.
There are, however, weapons in her arsenal. She is not as plain as her father thinks, nor as lacking in spirit. And she has an ally in her father's sister, Aunt Lavinia (Maggie Smith), who is thrilled by romantic intrigue and does everything she can to further the courtship--if only because it provides her entertainment by allowing her to sneak off as a secret emissary.
The movie is set in the years before the Civil War, in a newly prosperous section of Manhattan, where Dr. Sloper, as James tells us in his book, "was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there was nothing abstract in his remedies--he always ordered you to take something.'' Sloper earns a good income, but came into his fortune by marrying a rich woman, and so is uniquely prepared to judge the motives of young Mr. Townsend.
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