In thirty years of collaboration, producer Ismael Merchant, director James Ivory, and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have created twenty-odd films, the best of which (Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Shakespeare Wallah, their three E. M. Forster adaptations, and, best of the best, The Remains of the Day) have worked on the viewer like cinematic concentrates. Tightly structured, emotionally low-keyed, handsome but without spectacle or special effects, they linger in the mind long after viewing, expand, provoke discussion, become satisfying memories. Now, working with a much bigger budget (courtesy of Touchstone Pictures), they have produced Jefferson in Paris. And they have foundered. The money hasn't been spent on enriching a story but on stuffing it full of unassimilated research.

You can see what attracted the filmmaking team to this project. Jefferson, the Mona Lisa of American history, is, in their view, a man who deliberately repressed his deeper emotions and fit his life to a precise pattern. Drawn to an attractive and emotionally free-spending woman, he struggles to express his own emotions until circumstances and his own limitations drive him back into his shell. Whether or not this characterization captures the real Jefferson, it is certainly a reprise of Stevens, the butler-hero of The Remains of the Day. The inner journey of each is essentially the same.

But, of course, Merchant-Ivory's Thomas Jefferson, anyone's Thomas Jefferson, is not a servant of a rigid social order but a statesman, an architect, a political theorist, a future president, a landowner and slaveholder, and—in the period dealt with here—a diplomat to a France teetering on the brink of Europe's most momentous revolution. To succeed, the movie had to show Jefferson's emotional travails interacting decisively with the traumas of history.

It doesn't. For one thing, Jhabvala's script is primarily concerned with the widowed slaveowner's relationship with Sally Hemings, the black girl (not yet sixteen when she reputedly became pregnant by Jefferson) who was certainly his property and perhaps the mother of several of his children. (Historians haven't reached agreement.) In fact, the film opens with a journalist's visit (in 1873) to the Ohio homestead of Sally's son to investigate that man's claim to be the third president's son. The script then flashes back to the French court and Sally doesn't show up till midway in the movie. Though the theme of slave-holding reality vs. Jeffersonian idealism is announced by giving Sally's brother a few restive moments, the bulk of Jefferson's first half treats of the ambassador's affair-of-the-heart with Maria Cosway, the wife of a homosexual artist and herself a skilled painter. This romance is aborted by Jefferson's promise to his daughter, Patsy, not to remarry. Jhabvala seems to share the view of historian Page Smith that Jefferson's break with Maria led him to Sally as an outlet for his sexual and emotional neediness. Thus, Jefferson in Paris works out the destiny that will lead him back to Monticello's isolated, slavery-serviced splendor on a hill.

So there is a certain unity and logic to this story, but the story itself is buried under research. After all, since it all takes place at the doomed French court, how could the moviemakers bypass the time-tourist opportunities? We glimpse Marie Antoinette's unpopularity with her people, the inability of the American Congress to repay French veterans, Camille. Desmoulins's rabble-rousing, Louis XVI's political and sexual impotence, Mesmer's hypnotic experiments on noble women, the assembly of the third estate, the events leading up to the Tennis Court Oath. None of which has anything to do with Jefferson's troubles with American slavery and Sally Hemings.

Worse still, Jefferson, mostly a mere observer of the French uprisings, must narrate them in letters to his secretary (home in the States). So the designated protagonist becomes a voice on the soundtrack; the center of the story drifts to the periphery. It's dramatically ruinous.

Jhabvala sometimes incorporates passages from Jefferson's letters into the dialogue. She even lifts Jefferson's thoughts to Madison about “earth belongs always to the living …” and plants them in a love exchange between Maria and our hero. The transplant doesn't work. Neither does changing Jefferson's formal and witty “Dialogue between the Head and the Heart” into a improvised exchange among courtiers. The epistolary voice doesn't lend itself to dialogue.

And for all the bustle on screen, there is really very little to please the eye of the viewer. The photography is dark and dingy. Jefferson, though morally disapproving of court life, was sensually entranced by it. But the movie doesn't make us feel this because our senses remain unravished throughout.

Only in the very last scenes does the movie begin to focus on something: the pathetic absurdity of Sally Hemings's place in the Jefferson household. For some mild familiarity her face is slapped by Patsy Jefferson. It's one teen-aged girl slapping another, a mistress slapping her slave, and a girl slapping her own aunt: for Sally is the illegitimate daughter of Patsy's grandfather, Thomas's father-in-law. Not only do we know this but both girls know it, too.

And the final moment is poignant: Sally, offered her freedom, bursts into tears because she is bewildered, even terrified, by the possibility of freedom in a land that has no use for free blacks. But, by this time, it is too late to make this movie be about Sally. The last close-up of her tear-stained face is moving but frustrating. It's a fragment of a movie we haven't seen.

Nick Nolte's portrayal of Jefferson is a rough sketch of what might have been a good performance. He never got to the stage where he understood how this eighteenth-century genius moved and talked. His restraint isn't the character's restraint but the diffidence of an actor still finding his way. Greta Scacchi, always underrated as an actress just because she is a sexy-looking woman, makes Marie understandable and attractive, in so far as the script allows her. The same goes for Thandie Newton's Sally. Newton adroitly reveals that “dashing Sally” had to put on an act for her owners in order to ensure her position as a sort of mascot. But the script doesn't allow this promising actress enough opportunities to counterpoint the cuteness with the calculation manufacturing the cuteness.

There are successful biographical films that play fast and loose with facts in order to transform history into myth or romance (Young Mr. Lincoln, Lawrence of Arabia). There are also movies that by scrupulously mixing facts with tactful invention seem to transport us into a very real, profoundly felt past (Passolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, the uneven but stirring Gettysburg.) Jefferson in Paris belongs to neither group. It is a well-dressed, well-researched corpse.