The Remains of the Day
James Ivory (1993)
In the Merchant-Ivory filmography, The Remains of the Day is typical and untypical. Like most of their best-known work, it’s a period drama, adapted from an acclaimed novel. Unusually, the book in question pre-dates the screen version by only a few years: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day was first published in 1989. In this sense, the film adaptation has more in common with that of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1983) than with the adaptations of E M Forster and Henry James novels for which Merchant-Ivory became famous. Heat and Dust was published in 1975, when it won the Booker Prize – as Ishiguro’s novel would do fourteen years later. The writing credit on the two films is a further link, as well as to those Forster-James pictures: except for Maurice (1987), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted them all[1]. The Remains of the Day was a critical and box-office hit. Returning to it now, for the first time since a viewing on its original release, I found it unsatisfying. Although the story’s absorbing, there are problems with the script, with James Ivory’s direction and, much admired as they are, with the lead performances of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrative is anchored in the 1950s, when the protagonist and first-person narrator, Stevens, embarks on a short vacation from his duties as butler at Darlington Hall in Oxfordshire. His long-time employer, Lord Darlington, has recently died and the stately home has a new, American owner called Farraday. Stevens receives a letter from a former colleague, who worked as housekeeper at Darlington Hall, in the 1930s; the letter ‘set[s] off a certain chain of ideas to do with professional matters here at Darlington Hall’. The place is now understaffed and, Stevens thinks, could benefit from the services of an able and experienced housekeeper. Miss Kenton, as Stevens knew her, has for many years been Mrs Benn and living in the West Country but Stevens infers from her letter that she’s unhappy in her marriage and may be prepared to return to Darlington Hall. Mr Farraday is going to America for several weeks and encourages Stevens to ‘get out of the house for a few days’ while he’s away, and make use of Farraday’s car. Stevens does as his boss suggests. The novel is divided into a prologue and chapters named for successive stops en route to a climactic, fruitless reunion in Weymouth with Mrs Benn.
In the course of the journey, Stevens expounds his views on what makes a ‘great’ butler and recalls events – and non-events – at Darlington Hall in the years immediately before World War II, where Lord Darlington hosted gatherings of upper-crust sympathisers with Nazi Germany and Stevens managed to disappoint the romantic hopes of Miss Kenton, sending her into the arms of a man she didn’t love. It’s an article of faith to Stevens that greatness in his line of work ‘has to do crucially with the butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits’. It therefore wasn’t his place to query his employer’s motives in collaborating with the Hitler regime. Stevens claims to have thought Lord Darlington was working for the good of humanity but that belief was secondary to the butler’s conviction that his purpose was to serve his master and that he was – ex officio – privileged to do so. Though he wouldn’t have used the word, Stevens has ‘identified’ as a butler – an identity that has governed his personal as well as his working life: it wasn’t his place either to enter into a romantic attachment.
Ishiguro’s novel isn’t long (245 pages in our paperback copy); Ivory’s film (134 minutes) feels much longer. The screenplay – commendably, in principle – tries to do without Stevens’s voiceover but doesn’t find an alternative way of focusing the storytelling. Although Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adaptation is largely faithful in terms of what happens, The Remains on the Day on screen moves mechanically to and fro between below-stairs confrontations, the political goings-on at Darlington Hall and Stevens’s ‘motoring trip’. Nor does the film really address the challenge of inheriting from Ishiguro an unreliable – because a deluded – narrator. It’s very late on in the novel that Stevens acknowledges his life has been lived in error – ‘I trusted … I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really, one has to ask oneself, what dignity is there in that?’ (Stevens’s only bulwark against the horror of this realisation is retreat into his habitual, damaging self-deception.)
Attenuating without fully rethinking Stevens’s perspective creates a particular problem vis-à-vis Lord Darlington (James Fox). For much of the film, we seem to be seeing Darlington from his butler’s loyal, blinkered point of view. Even when that can’t be sustained – most obviously in scenes from which Stevens is absent – Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala, compared with Ishiguro, go easy on his lordship, who usually comes across as an upper-class twit, exploited by nastier, cleverer appeasers. A rare departure from the novel makes matters worse. In the book, as he and his cronies ratchet up their anti-semitism, Darlington asks Stevens if there are any Jews on the Darlington Hall staff; there are two and they’re dismissed – to Stevens’s mute discomfort and Miss Kenton’s more vocal distress. Ivory preserves those reactions but the staff concerned (Joanna Joseph and Emma Lewis) arrive at Darlington Hall, midway through the film, as refugees from Nazi Germany and are then promptly sent packing. This makes no sense. Lord Darlington’s fascist sympathies have already been made clear. Stevens would hardly have taken the humanitarian initiative to rescue these girls by hiring them as housemaids.
The story’s bleakness leaves little room for nostalgia about either the 1950s or the 1930s. Even so, James Ivory, while not quite luxuriating in the period settings, is eager to showcase the production design and décor – to confirm that this is a prestige picture. It’s just as well, in order to counteract admiring shots of a vintage Daimler, that Anthony Hopkins so deftly conveys Stevens’s respectful unease about using his new boss’s car for his West Country travels. Ivory does better in describing the minutiae of domestic routine at Darlington Hall and Tony Pierce-Roberts’s cinematography captures the spatial differences between upstairs and downstairs life. The constricted space of Stevens’s den is used to fine effect in a scene in which Miss Kenton, desperately trying to get an emotional response, virtually pins him down there. Pierce-Roberts’s camerawork was among the virtues of the Merchant-Ivory Howards End (1992). One of the relatively few weaknesses of that film was Richard Robbins’s score (or parts of it); the same composer does more damage in The Remains of the Day. Robbins’s interfering ominous music is doubly frustrating when it drowns out the more interesting soundtrack of Darlington Hall – footsteps on various surfaces, the unique sound of a particular door being shut.
For a drama in which class distinctions play such an important part, the film is in one crucial respect puzzling. Anthony Hopkins’s Stevens is beautifully spoken – in contrast to his father, known as Mr Stevens Sr (Peter Vaughan), who has also spent his working life in service and, now well past his prime as a butler, is recruited by his son to the Darlington Hall staff, with unhappy results. Ishiguro explains, through Stevens (Jr), this difference in accents:
‘… it must be remembered that my father was a butler of an earlier generation who began his career at a time when such attributes [as ‘good accent and command of language’, among others] were not considered proper, let alone desirable in a butler. … [My] generation has been too much preoccupied with the “trimmings”; goodness knows how much time and energy has gone into the practising of accent and command of language …’
There’s no such explanation in the film. Stevens, at the head of the servants’ table, corrects the grammar of second footman George (Steve Dibben) but concedes that, without ‘my education’, he’d know no better himself. On the page, Stevens’s costive, excessively formal manner of expression betrays the effort of ‘practising … command of language’: his English is so unnaturally careful that he seems to be telling his story in what, to him, is almost a foreign language. Although Hopkins also speaks carefully, the caution is a function of his character’s deference and emotional distance: this Stevens doesn’t pronounce words in a way that suggests he’s fearful of not pronouncing them correctly. When the Daimler breaks down in a Devon village, and Stevens has to stay overnight in an inn, it’s all too easy to believe that the locals, except for the GP (Pip Torrens) who gives him a lift next morning, accept Stevens as a man of high social rank. Miss Kenton is almost relieved to find him in private reading a ‘sentimental old love story’ (her words), quickly dismayed when Stevens insists that ‘I read these books – any books – to develop my command and knowledge of the English language … to further my education’. For the film’s audience, this explanation is welcome even if not convincing. Up to this point, you’ve been tempted to wonder if Mr Stevens Sr somehow contrived to pay to send his son to private school or, at least, to elocution lessons.
Unlike Hopkins, Emma Thompson does speak in voiceover – and does an accent into the bargain. Her voice, reading the letter that takes Stevens on his travels, is the first that we hear in the film. Although Thompson doesn’t overdo it, her vowels immediately make clear Mrs Benn’s lower-class origins; her unmistakably regretful tone penetrates the words of the letter and anticipates her character’s fate. Once the younger Miss Kenton is working at Darlington Hall, Thompson’s accent tends to come and go a bit. The most impressive part of the performance is her incarnation of Mrs Benn in the 1950s: Thompson was only in her early thirties when she made The Remains of the Day but her movement – especially her walk – is believably that of a woman twenty years older. She’s never socially quite right, though. (I wish Lesley Manville, three years older than Thompson, had been a big enough name at the time to play this role.) One or two of the small parts are overdone – Tim Pigott-Smith as Miss Kenton’s charmless future husband, Pip Torrens’s suspicious Dr Carlisle – but there’s good work from Hugh Grant (as Lord Darlington’s journalist godson), Ben Chaplin and Lena Headey (as servants who leave Darlington Hall to marry one another). Christopher Reeve does well as Congressman Jack Lewis: as in the novel, Lewis is a lone voice speaking out against appeasement in the pre-war gatherings; it’s a neat adjustment to the source material that he also becomes the post-war owner of Darlington Hall. Best of all in the supporting cast is Peter Vaughan, whose aggressive presence develops an increasingly desperate quality: Stevens Sr is a figure who both intimidates and embarrasses his son.
In the film’s final scene, Stevens is back from his travels. When a pigeon gets into one of the rooms at Darlington Hall, he’s able to guide the bird to the window he has opened and it flies away. As a means of making clear what Stevens can’t do for himself, the image is banal but Anthony Hopkins’s eloquent underplaying redeems things. I don’t mean to suggest that Hopkins isn’t impressive throughout. Even though I feel his voice and assured delivery miss an important aspect of the character, his portrait of Stevens as a study in self-discipline and emotional repression is a considerable feat. That Stevens’s plight didn’t move me has less to do with Hopkins than with Kazuo Ishiguro. I wasn’t moved by the novel either – I think because, accomplished as it is, it strikes me as a scrupulously worked out idea. Although it’s dramatically effective that Stevens’s code of conduct deprives him of agency in all parts of his life, I don’t really believe that it necessarily blinds him to the feelings he and Miss Kenton have for each other, as well to what Lord Darlington is up to. The book has the edge on the film principally because, with Stevens telling the story, Ishiguro can keep the reader, like the narrator, in the dark for longer. On the screen, The Remains of the Day says most of what it has to say in short order, and goes on saying it for too long.
31 December 2022
[1] Worth noting, though, that Harold Pinter wrote the first draft screenplay for The Remains of the Day. At that stage, the film was set to be directed by Mike Nichols. When the production changed hands (although Nichols was eventually credited as one of three producers), Pinter asked not to receive any writing credit.