Love at odds with English society
This review was originally published Oct. 1, 1987. The film is being re-released in a 30th-anniversary 4K restoration.
With compassion, humor and detachment, James Ivory’s superb film of E.M. Forster’s “Maurice” takes us into the complacent, fixed world of Britain’s privileged classes before World War I.
It offers a seductively cozy, absolute security for the conventional — and no place for those who defy its codes. It could be an absolute hell for a homosexual, which Forster was himself.
Forster shrewdly made his hero, Maurice, an utterly regular fellow, perfect product of his time and place except for his sexual orientation. Maurice’s slow, agonized dawning of his true nature and its consequences are as beautifully evoked on the screen as on the printed page, thanks to James Wilby’s wonderfully unaffected portrayal of Maurice and to Ivory and his co-adapter Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s graceful yet succinct script, a miracle of both apt selectivity and development that does full honor to its distinguished source.
The feelings that the bright, handsome Clive (Hugh Grant) stir in Maurice plunge them both into multisided conflict, for their love for each other puts them at odds not only with their social class but also the teachings of their Anglican background, the views of the medical profession at the time — Freud had clearly not yet dented the English upper-middle classes — and British law, which made them susceptible to blackmail as well as prison.
“Maurice.” Rating: R. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes. Playing: Landmark Nuart, West L.A.