moonspinner55 Review of The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day (1993)

Not so much carefully nuanced as it is carefully contrived...

[6/10 · 17 April 2014]

A former U.S. Congressman--now a multimillionaire (!)--purchases an English estate in the 1950s which was due to be demolished after the previous Lord of the manor passed on; in retaining the butler of the house, the new owner is persuaded to rehire the former housekeeper, who shares a complex history with the butler dating back to WWII. It's difficult to watch a James Ivory film and not feel contempt for the agonizing pace he sets and for his hoked-up sentimentality (as if human repression really needed to be romanticized). The facetious comparisons between Americans and the British (and the British attitude towards the Germans) are due to screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's faithfully embalmed adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's book, though leads Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson (he of the stiff-upper-lip school, she a chatterbox) do manage to carve out characters from stock. Ornate production reveals a scene or two of true, honest feeling, while the finale is amusingly sparse. **1/2 from ****