The fortunes of the Merchant-Ivory producer-director team have suffered somewhat in recent years; efforts like Jefferson in Paris and Surviving Picasso have garnered mixed reviews and little box-office interest. There was a time, though, when the duo's trademark period pieces were virtually guaranteed critical approval; among their best efforts were 1986's Room With a View and 1992's Howards End, both of which gave the team something of a reputation for sumptuous costume dramas with melodramatic plotlines. Perhaps their finest effort, however, came in 1993 with Remains of the Day--which, though it fits the customary period-piece mold in some respects, succeeds on a wholly different level.
The setting is southern England, and the time flashes back and forth between the late 1950s and the 1930s. Darlington Hall, once a bustling mansion and estate, has fallen on hard times, owned now by an American and run by a skeleton staff. Mr. Stevens, the butler, perceives the need for a "revised staff plan" and sets off across England in hopes of rehiring a woman who had once served as housekeeper. The trip serves as an occasion for Stevens to reflect on his life of service and on the decisions he has made in his service to Lord Darlington, a well-meaning fellow who developed both sympathies and close contacts with Nazi Germany as the Second World War approached. Stevens, for his part, professed loyalty to his employer, but the course of the film brings out doubts about both the wisdom of that loyalty and its consequences.
Remains is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's book, a novel acclaimed in its own right but hardly, at first glance, suitable for film treatment. The novel is set down in the form of Stevens's thoughts and writings: the reader often detects his doubts under a veneer of excuses and justifications for his own and for others' conduct. As such, it plays with tensions between the subjective and objective: to determine what happened, it is now and again necessary to discount the narrator's words as self-serving deception, or look askance at thoughts or feelings that the narrator imputes to himself in memory. Filtering the audience's viewpoint through a subjective account in this way would be a difficult task for a film, and this one doesn't really try: instead, it relies on the story itself, and its themes of loyalty and self-denial. There is accordingly not quite so much to chew on here as in the novel, and certain scenes documenting Stevens's struggling conscience don't work quite as well--but the acting more than makes up for it.
It is sometimes said that Anthony Hopkins plays a limited range of roles, that many of his parts are reprises of the same repressed or inexpressive type. If nothing else, his performance as Stevens in Remains is evidence to the contrary: though he inhabits a role and a persona that require permanent composure, he nonetheless manages to convey a wide range of feelings. Hopkins is a master of nuance: a blink, a set of the jaw, a voice inflection often must suffice to express his character's conflicts or longings. Particularly compelling in that respect are those moments when he is off his guard or unsure: there is a hilarious moment early in the film when he is called on to explain the "birds and the bees" to Lord Darlington's godson. (The scene is all the funnier now, since the godson is played by none other than Hugh Grant, who turned out to have some knowledge of the subject.) Hopkins plays a man struggling to fill a role, and it is in the moments where he cannot quite fill it--the moments that strain his powers of composure--that his talents really shine. Few actors could do as much with this role as Hopkins does here; he was nominated for Best Actor for this role, and it is arguable that he should have won. Equally compelling is Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton, the housekeeper who shakes up Stevens's carefully ordered world: much of her part is given over to testing his limits and trying to draw him out. Though the role is thereby limited, she has her moments, notably in a scene where she mocks his mannerisms ("the way you pinch your nose when you put pepper on your food"). A particularly memorable scene shows her backing him into a corner to wrest a book from his grasp; the book plays it mostly for laughs ("I judged it best to look away, but...this could only be achieved by my twisted my head away at a somewhat unnatural angle"), but the film brings out the sudden intimacy of the moment. James Fox is convincingly well-intentioned as the naive Lord Darlington, and Peter Vaughan is suitably gruff as Stevens's father, but the film's power derives from the performa of the leads--and the emotional impact of its last third is considerable.
There is a tremendous amount going on in Remains, enough that it bears repeated viewing (seven times over for me); there are two fully developed plotlines that intertwine to some extent, and several subplots deriving from them. The Nazi-appeasement angle, even if its main function is to cast in harsh light Stevens's devotion to duty (and, through his employer's flirting with fascism, to put a disturbing spin on that devotion), takes up a considerable part of the story: the flashbacks chart the increasing depth of Darlington's involvement with Germany. In the book, the tension between Stevens's claim to be proud of his association with Darlington and his evasiveness (and outright lying) when asked about his connection to the Nazi appeaser is a major insight into the truths that he would rather not confront, and serves as a catalyst for some unwilling reflection. In the film, though some of the same scenes appear, they are not as obviously significant (or their significance is couched differently). The second plotline, that of Stevens himself (and, most obviously, his relationship with Miss Kenton), is the more compelling of the two--Darlington, the tragic figure of the first plot, doesn't really get enough attention to command the audience's sympathy in the way that Stevens does. Accordingly, the first storyline gets pushed to the background toward the end, to the point that an important development in the Nazi- connection angle that occurs near the end feels rather unexpected. One of the subplots highlighting Stevens' character involves Stevens's father's illness and death, which Stevens manages to turn into a test on his "dignity" rather than a time of personal loss; again, the book brings out these tensions somewhat better, in that his final word on the memory is to proclaim it a personal "triumph," but the film does show the constricted exchanges between father and son in a way that feels, again, compelling. The impressive part is that the script makes develops Stevens's character--and, again, his relationship with Miss Kenton--mostly through indirection; never does he give a soul-baring speech, never do the two actually voice their feelings. So nuanced is the acting that apparently ordinary moments feel emotionally charged simply because they violate the confines of the central relationship, and the audience does not need to be told explicitly what is on a given character's mind.
As might be expected from Merchant-Ivory, the film looks remarkable: the interiors of Darlington Hall are elaborate, both in their prewar splendor and their latter-day emptiness. Visually, there are many effective moments, both on the large scale--a fox hunt, an opening tracking shot that moves up a twisting driveway--and small: both Hopkins and Thompson are plausible as twenty-years-older versions. Especially effective are the early scenes, where ghosts of bygone years seem to appear to Stevens around every corner, and Miss Kenton appears, walking in a back corridor, before fading and dissolving into mist. There is some disagreement on the last shot--some critics consider its imagery too obvious--but for simple emotional impact, it works to perfection. Richard Robbins's score, for its part, captures the repetitiveness of a servant's life, and the contrasting emotional drama, fairly well, though at times it seems oddly placed.
As a film, Remains stands or falls on the effectiveness of Hopkins, both in conveying the essentials of the character and in making him sympathetic. And by and large, he succeeds on both counts: he makes those moments where Stevens must deny himself and take up his cross feel genuine and painful, rather than simply depictions of a repressed butler who has become accustomed to repression. Rather than simply playing an inhibited character, Hopkins plays a character who feels that his vocation demands that he mask his feelings (a "dignity in keeping with his position"), and when the mask slips slightly at key moments--the one small scene in private where he loses his composure entirely works all the better for his icy calm when back in public again--the effect is riveting. With a lead less skilled than Hopkins, this could have been dreary and dull; as it is, it packs quite a punch. Though not exactly uplifting, Remains deserves consideration among the decade's best films.
Duncan Stevens d-stevens@nwu.edu 312-654-0280
The room is as you left it; your last touch-- A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself As saintly--hallows now each simple thing, Hallows and glorifies, and glows between The dust's gray fingers, like a shielded light.
--from "Interim," by Edna St. Vincent Millay
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