MAURICE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
(***SPOILERS***)
Capsule review: Disappointing E. M. Forster entry by much of the same team that made A ROOM WITH A VIEW. A plea for acceptance of homosexuality flounders in melodrama, florid production values, and even a mild dash of sexism. There is enough quality present to make the film worth seeing, but not as much as you'd think. Rating: +1. (The following review contains spoilers and opinions that are going to draw flak.)
Over the last few years there has been a discovery of the works of E. M. Forster by filmmakers. Until A PASSAGE TO INDIA, I don't think anyone had ever filmed a Forster novel. Since then, we have seen A ROOM WITH A VIEW and now MAURICE. The new entry is the story of a homosexual, Maurice (pronounced "Morris") Hall, who discovered his own homosexuality at Cambridge and a bunch of other people's as he went along. MAURICE tells the story of his discomfort in a country that is "disinclined to accept human nature."
Maurice becomes aware of his homosexuality at Cambridge, where we are shown that he runs into no women who are attractive or interesting. There are darn few women in the whole film who are not portrayed as superficial and vacuous. But there are lots of pretty men running around. In class, they read classics with references to homosexuality (the professors tell the boys just to skip over the explicit parts and interpret the rest as platonic love). One thing sort of leads to another and Maurice meets Clive Durham, who is close and pretty and soon they are pretty close. The film follows their affair for a few years until Clive decides to buckle under to public pressure and marry someone of the opposite sex instead. It isn't long before he is telling Maurice how he was surprised to find that women are nice too. (It is the only scene in the film that has much nice to say about women.) Maurice tries to have an American hypnotist (played by Ben Kingsley doing his best to sound like a Texan) cure him, but it doesn't work and soon Maurice decides that if he cannot have Clive, he will have Clive's assistant gamekeeper.
There are always two parts to an E. M. Forster story. There is the story itself and there is the social comment. A PASSAGE TO INDIA, in addition to having a good story, argued cogently for home rule for India. I became firmly convinced that Britain did the right thing almost forty years ago. A ROOM WITH A VIEW argued that Edwardian social custom really screwed up people's lives and I left the theater shouting "Down with Edwardian social custom!" It too told a good story. MAURICE is perhaps the most relevant to our society and even in that it is more than seventy years out of date, but the story itself is not very good this time around. It is overly long in the telling--about 140 minutes--and is much more melodramatic than director Ivory's previous ROOM WITH A VIEW. I think Ivory wanted to repeat that film's success, so he put in many of the same faces, forced Ben Kingsley into the wrong role, chose a not-very-good novel, and then gave it a long and florid treatment. With the talents involved, the film could not go wrong, but one would expect a much better rating than a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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