The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The English so well
Not every film worked out so swimmingly, especially when they experimented outside their corseted comfort zone. In 1989, their misjudged contemporary comedy Slaves of New York, based on Tama Janowitz’s short stories about the Manhattan art scene, received a critical mauling.
Ivory says he could usually tell when there was a backlash brewing. “We were to have two more experiences like that with Jefferson in Paris (1995) and Surviving Picasso,” he recalls, “which the critics fell on with the greatest impatience and almost a kind of rage.” Does he ever feel that the high standing of A Room with a View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day as cornerstones of the brand has led to other Merchant Ivory films falling into unfair neglect? You bet he does. He singles out Nineties film Mr and Mrs Bridge as a good one that fell between the cracks.
The critic who threw the most brickbats was the formidable Pauline Kael of the New Yorker magazine. Even when she confessed to liking A Room with a View, “she couldn’t bring herself to praise my work,” Ivory once said. “It was as if the things she liked about the movie – its playful tone, the acting, and so on – had all happened on their own, independent of me. I felt there was a basic insincerity, or dishonesty, in her attitude. Still, I came to believe that to have a powerful enemy like Kael only made me stronger. You know, like a kind of voodoo. I wonder if it worked that way in those days for any of her other victims – Woody Allen, for instance, or Stanley Kubrick.”
Even on this side of the Atlantic, Merchant Ivory’s films weren’t everyone’s dainty cup of Earl Grey. Alan Parker, flying the flag for a more pungent state of the art, gave them a bitchy future epitaph when a cartoon he drew in Screen International pilloried them as “Laura Ashley kinds of films”. There was a phase, especially in the mid-to-late Nineties, when the prevailing critical orthodoxy was to deride them as stately and pedestrian, overdressed and undersexed – the antithesis of everything that new-wave auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino or Danny Boyle were bringing to the table.
Much of this opprobrium now seems shallow, dated and aggressively shortsighted. After all, there’s a world of qualitative difference between The Remains of the Day and Downton Abbey, which it certainly influenced, right down to the bubbling, ostinato-fond musical score. It’s all in Ivory’s nuanced handling of self-denial. Maurice (1987), the second in their Forster trilogy, forthrightly tackled gay love in an era when the subject was still anathema to large sections of the mainstream.
Above all, revisiting Howards End makes any eye-rolling dismissal of the duo’s work flatly impossible. The film is simply too rich – especially in social comedy, the collision of Schlegels and Wilcoxes like some slow-motion Edwardian sports event telling us volumes about the contestants. Later this year, the BBC will air a new four-part adaptation of Forster’s book, written by Kenneth Lonergan, but you won’t find Ivory envying him the luxury of this greater running time. “Howards End was two hours 20 – our longest movie, and as long as it need be, I think.”
Since the fading of Merchant Ivory’s lustre – their last film completed together was 2005’s little-seen The White Countess, with a screenplay by Ishiguro – there has been no clear successor to their legacy. As the last man standing to represent it, Ivory has complicated feelings. “It is poignant, of course. How can it not be? But there we are. There was a time when Ruth and Ismail did all the speaking, and all the writing,” he says. “Now I feel I have to speak for everybody. It’s up to me.”
(1984) Based on Henry James’s novel, the film makes feminist Olive (Vanessa Redgrave) more (1986) Scoring a breakthrough commercial success, Merchant Ivory’s first (1990) Hollywood couple Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman explore a
(1992) Well-meaning Schlegel sisters and practical Wilcoxes are thrust into each others’ lives,
(1993) Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel gave Anthony Hopkins a field day as the sympathetic than her nemesis, Christopher Reeve’s Basil, as they battle for influence over a smart young girl. E M Forster adaptation was a broadening of horizons, both for them and Helena Bonham Carter. wartime marriage on the rocks, pondering a sense of futility after their three children leave the nest. causing everyone to re-examine what they most cherish, in a philosophical vision of Forster. repressed butler denying his employer’s Nazi sympathies and a life unlived with Emma Thompson.