JEFFERSON IN PARIS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1995 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Nick Nolte, Greta Scacchi, Thandie Newton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Seth Gilliam. Screenplay: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Director: James Ivory.
If Ismail Merchant and James Ivory are not careful, their names might very well lose their proper noun status. Like Q-Tip or Xerox, "Merchant Ivory" is becoming something of a generic term, a descriptor for intimate period pieces in the tradition of critical successes like A ROOM WITH A VIEW, HOWARDS END and THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. For many moviegoers, though, the term is also used to evoke images of technically proficient but turgid filmmaking. Sadly, JEFFERSON IN PARIS is everything their most vocal detractors have accused Merchant Ivory efforts of being. There are plenty of beautiful sets, meaningful glances and profound discussions, but there isn't a shred of compelling drama to connect them, or a single key character into whose life we are given any insight.
JEFFERSON IN PARIS takes place primarily in the years 1784 to 1789, when Thomas Jefferson (Nick Nolte) lived in Paris as American ambassador to France. His beloved wife having died, Jefferson brings the eldest of his three daughters, Patsy (Gwyneth Paltrow), to stay with him, but otherwise is quite alone. That changes when he falls in love with Maria Cosway (Greta Scacchi), the English- Italian wife of English painter Richard Cosway (Simon Callow), but circumstances frequently conspire to keep them apart. After the death of Jefferson's youngest daughter, he summons the remaining daughter to Paris, along with her slave nurse Sally Hemings (Thandie Newton). Although he maintains a correspondence and friendship with Maria, Jefferson also begins a a secretive relationship with Sally, while the stirrings of the French Revolution cause turmoil in the Paris courts.
There are any number of ways the Merchant Ivory team could have approached these years in the life of a man of many contradictions. They could have examined his reactions to the ostentations of the French court which expedited its downfall in 1789; they could have explored the reasons why the architect of democracy was also a slave owner; they could have delved into his troubled personal life. And that is precisely what they did, and a dozen other things besides. This is not a biographical sketch with a point of view. It's a series of anecdotes, many of them apocryphal. Of what particular relevance, for example, is Jefferson's mission to secure a loan from the Dutch? Or a lengthy scene at an opera in which the relationship between Jefferson and Maria Cosway is not furthered one bit? Writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a genius at adapting the narratives of other writers for the screen, but she does a terrible job of constructing a narrative from a collection of historical footnotes. This is simply EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THOMAS JEFFERSON BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK.
Jhabvala's ability to create characters also deserts her, leaving JEFFERSON IN PARIS filled with incomplete sketches. Gwyneth Paltrow (FLESH AND BONE) has the most interesting part as Patsy Jefferson, the troubled girl who feels abandoned by her father's daliance with Sally, but there are significant gaps left in her character as well (notably her reaction to Jefferson's refusal to allow her conversion to Catholicism). Greta Scacchi and Thandie Newton are both under-developed as the women in Jefferson's life, and his attraction to Maria in particular makes no sense based on their interaction. But that is part of the greatest disaster, Nick Nolte's stiff Thomas Jefferson. It is an awful performance of a character with tremendous potential, and the script never even bothers to try to get inside his head. I felt I had a better understanding of Jefferson from staring at Mount Rushmore.
Ivory does deliver some finely crafted scenes, of course, such as Louis XVI learning about the revolution while on a hunt, and Richard Robbins' score and Tony Pierce-Roberts' cinematography are characteristically superb. Unfortunately, the way Ivory frames the story (beginning with a flashback featuring James Earl Jones as the son of Jefferson and Sally Hemings telling the story to a reporter) makes the failings of JEFFERSON IN PARIS all the more evident. It isn't about the scandalous, if historically questionable, notion that Jefferson fathered children by one of his slaves. It isn't really *about* anything. Like the worst high school history textbooks, it just starts in one place and ends in another, and all you really want to do is look at the pictures.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 floundering fathers: 3.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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