[4] It stars Kate Beckinsale, James Fox, Anjelica Huston, Nick Nolte, Jeremy Northam, Madeleine Potter, and Uma Thurman.

Maggie has a very close relationship with her millionaire father Adam, a widowed tycoon living in England who plans a museum in the United States to house his collection of art and antiquities.

While there, he recognizes photographs of Amerigo and Charlotte and innocently reveals they were the couple who originally considered purchasing the bowl before the wedding.

Director Ivory, producer Merchant, and screenwriter Jhabvala previously collaborated on screen adaptations of the Henry James novels The Europeans and The Bostonians.

Conflict erupted between Northam and Beckinsale after the latter asked him to walk faster in a scene to avoid stepping on the train of her dress.

Northam was so angry at being given a "note" by a fellow actor that he became belligerent towards Beckinsale; her partner, Michael Sheen, responded by punching him in the face.

The soundtrack includes "Moonstruck" by Lionel Monckton and Ivan Caryll, "Sarabande" by Claude Debussy, and "Wall Street Rag" by Scott Joplin.

When it received a cool reception, executives at Miramax Films, the original distributor, asked Ivory and Merchant to make several cuts to shorten its running time.

The website's consensus reads: "Coming from the Merchant-Ivory team, The Golden Bowl is visually stunning, but the filmmakers have difficulty in transporting the characterizations of the Henry James novel to the screen.

"[7] The New York Times observed, "In translating the novel into a film, the producer Ismail Merchant, his directing partner, James Ivory, and their favorite screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, have made a movie that's an ambitious, profoundly ambiguous statement about their own passion for the cultivated, high-culture sensibility epitomized by James and E. M. Forster, as opposed to the cruder mass culture that has eclipsed these literary heroes .

Much of the dialogue in Ms. Jhabvala's carefully wrought screenplay voices feelings that remain unspoken in the novel, and this is the movie's biggest problem.

No matter how well the characters' thoughts have been translated into speech, the act of compressing their rich, complex inner lives into dialogue without resorting to voice-over narration inevitably tends to cheapen them and turn a drama about the revelation of hidden truths into the terser, more commonplace language of an intelligent soap opera.

He added, "James' deft portrait of human frailty and his experimentation in narrative mode only intermittently find vivid expression in the work of Ivory and screenwriter Prawer Jhabvala.

Production values, particularly Andrew Sanders' design and John Bright's costumes, are exquisite, but they decorate a film that's too slow and only sporadically involving.