Updated: 5 July 1997

REMAINS OF THE DAY

This is a quietly brilliant film.

It isn't hard to love movies that show us, this beautifully, the labyrinth of emotions their characters are winding their way through. I can't remember why--it's been several years--but I thought HOWARD'S END was a very dry film. That is not the case here.

A better comparison is probably the film I rented two weeks before I saw this one: AGE OF INNOCENCE. I went into that show with high expectations. It had been recommended by a co- worker. I thought it was almost completely artificial--it suffered from the same obsession with "surface" that plagued the Victorian era it was supposed to be exposing.

Two weeks after that debacle, I had worked myself up to watch another period piece, and REMAINS OF THE DAY WAS IT. A happy ending to my story. It is a nearly perfect film. First of all, the stars are marvelous. One of them, of course, is the soul of acting perfection: Emma Thompson. And the other isn't so bad, either: Anthony Hopkins. How these two manage to form some kind of chemistry in two movies, let alone one, is beyond me. Especially with the kind of characters Anthony Hopkins is usually playing in them.

Regardless, there is, by the end of this film, an agonizing moment where the future of this non- relationship hangs in the balance, and you want to shout at him: "Say something you idiot! Don't let her leave without knowing how you feel!" Pretty impressive for a stodgy butler and the almost prim character Emma plays.

Almost the entire movie is a flashback, couched between scenes of Anthony Hopkins en route to an appointment with Emma Thompson, with the hope of persuading her to resume her former position as housekeeper. And possibly more. The flashback is the story of her initial hiring-on at the mansion and how her life and his intertwine without ever quite touching.

The backdrop is sumptuous enough: it is pre-World War II England. The manor is a prosperous one, with a prominent Lord whose political motivations are not always as wisely thought out as they could be, but whose moral motivations are kind. The electricity in the air at the international dinners hosted by the Lord is tangible.

The sense of duty interfering with the butler's life is faint at first, then gradually becomes suffocating. There are many whose art consumes their lives, pulling other aspects of their worlds into the vortex of their creativity. The passion for perfection in his work as a butler, however, seems to exclude everything else. Nothing becomes entangled with his art, because the nature of his artistry is to absolutely avoid all entanglements--to keep everything well-oiled and free of obstruction.

Sadly, by the time he has mellowed out enough to separate his life from his work, all of those obstacles have fallen away, and his life is visibly empty. Sanitized, in a way.

All of this is seen while we know he is on his way to his one last chance at making his life whole. It is a wise film that can show us the breadth and depth of the void in a man's life, and how that void was made. It is a wonderful film that can make us care. This is a quiet film, but one that has a thundering theme, and brilliantly stormy moments, too.