The Talkies/Maurice

...Then there's the minister who, thinking that Maurice's interest in Alec is merely charitable, delivers an improbably backward and fatuous speech to him about Alec's lamentable carnality, his commission of the dreadful "sin of sensuality...

...We don't really learn till after the fact, for example, that Maurice and Clive's affair is platonic...

...run credits...

...Hugh Grant's performance is only marginally better...

...In the meantime, let there be no misunderstanding: in a movie landscape populated by goonies and gremlins and robo-cops, even the failures of the Ivory-Merchant team are more deserving of respect, and of serious discussion, than most other filmmakers' successes...

...But Clive's feelings are such a question mark at this point that the closing of the shutters seems melodramatic, phony...

...but in Wilby's hands he comes across as oafish, doltish, dull...

...nobody seemed to find it the slightest bit anachronistic or out of character...

...And Maurice, who up to now has been a polite, quiet, and obedient young man, becomes unruly, skipping tutorials and chapel to spend time with his beloved, and behaving insolently toward profs and family alike...

...From the reviews, Maurice (which, just in case you decide to drop the name of it at a cocktail party, should be pronounced in the British manner, to wit: Morris) sounded rather like a superior version of Another Country, a worthy pendant to the magnificent television miniseries of Brideshead Revisited...

...One doesn't feel, in fact, as if one knows Maurice very well at all...

...Clive—who refuses Risley's request for help—is frightened by the courtroom spectacle, and, suddenly realizing that he is risking everything he has by romancing Maurice, tells him that henceforth they will be friends, nothing more...

...Maurice is a beautifully and meticulously made movie—the direction intelligent, the photography and lighting exquisite, the set decoration sumptuous—and one certainly feels, once it is over, that one should be terribly moved by it all...

...I'm afraid I can't join in their chorus of ecstatic praise...

...and who finally abandons his job and family, indeed his entire world, to live with a relative stranger...

...In these post-Cambridge sequences, Ivory has both leading men look and act and carry themselves as if they're supposed to be in their forties rather than their early twenties—and it doesn't work...

...A more remarkable achievement than A Room with a View" (Stephen Harvey, Village Voice...

...They become lovers...

...In the Alec sequences, in particular, the contrast between Clive's wealth, life of artificial comforts, and sexual repression, on the one hand, and Alec's poverty, closeness to nature, and easy acceptance of sexuality, on the other, is much too simplemindedly conceived and heavyhandedly drawn—not to mention patronizing toward the lower orders...

...But Wilby is incapable of making the viewer buy a single one of these volatile changes or incarnations...

...Then, several months into their friendship, Clive makes a pass...

...much of the dialogue in this film is hard to make out) and reaching up to touch Maurice's face...

...When Clive dumps him, he starts giving boxing lessons to Cockney young men at a seedy local gymnasium (which is by itself a baffling enough turn of events: Maurice does not impress one as the sort of lad who could teach a Cockney anything about pugilism), and his pupils love him for his egalitarian ways...

...It's the Big Moment and Ivory takes us right into it without any warning, without any preliminaries, without the slightest suggestion as to how it happened to come on this day, at this moment...

...Maurice is a noble failure...

...And not until the Risley trial do we have a sense that they are playing a highly dangerous game which could destroy both of their careers...

...I stood on line at the Paris Theater on 58th Street in Manhattan for an hour in the full expectation of being involved, moved, shaken—or, if not that, then at least bewitched by the grace, sensitivity, intelligence, and beauty of it all, as had been my reaction in 1986 when I saw Merchant and Ivory's A Room with a Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...one problem is that, though the film encompasses only five years in its characters' lives, taking them into their early twenties, Ivory seemingly wants to create the illusion that more time than that is passing...

...Shortly thereafter both young men leave Cambridge, Maurice for his mother's house in London and a bank job, Clive for his family's country estate, London town house, and a political career...

...But after a period of guilt and mutual distrust, Maurice and Alec find love and happiness with one another...

...The hypnotherapist, for instance, who apparently makes his living trying to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, nonetheless makes a crack at one point about the English intolerance for human nature—his implication being that homosexuality is a natural condition...

...Nor does it help that there's virtually no chemistry between the two actors...

...On the contrary, Clive is extremely reckless, cuddling with Maurice in front of the servants and laughing at his embarrassment...

...Patently, this minister exists for no other reason than to deliver remarks for us to scoff at...

...We watch Maurice and Clive meet...

...Maurice is, furthermore, supposed to be a young man full of passionate longings...

...His essay on Ruth Prawer Jhabvala appears in the December 1987 issue of the New Criterion...

...The story is dramatic...

...The greatest movie of the year" (Richard Freedman, Newhouse Newspapers...

...For that matter, one doesn't feel as if the filmmakers know him well either...

...imagine 'Tyrone Power romancing Martin Milner and you pretty much get the idea...

...Let me say that after several months of viewing mindless comedies and romantic thrillers—many of which were fine enough, I suppose, but which were, after all, only thrillers—I very much looked forward to Maurice...

...who then just as rapidly becomes distraught and confused about his sexuality...

...after a while Ivory puts a mustache on Clive as well...

...There's no energy in him, no fire...

...The film that these critics are writing about is Maurice, the latest offering from the distinguished producer and director team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory...

...we feel as if we're seeing it all from outside...

...when he follows Maurice to London after their first night together, and offers declarations of affection in one breath and blackmail threats in the next, it all makes sense...

...Strangely, both Grant and Wilby comeacross as too old to be undergraduates and too young to be, respectively, a politician and an investment banker...

...Like the awesomely stupid Another Country, though, it's a movie I'd gladly see again just for the mise en scene...

...When I saw the film, the audience erupted in laughter and applause at this line...

...To both of them—and to the filmmakers—their romance often seems to be, more than anything else, a delicious little secret, an inside joke on the world around them...

...It should be a powerful ending...

...but I'm not sure...

...But one isn't...

...later, when Clive takes him aside on the college quadrangle and announces "I love you," Maurice spits out his contempt—only to declare, soon afterwards, that he loves Clive as well...

...and how do they feel about it...

...particularly handsome either—all of which make it hard to believe that not one but two very good-looking young men would fall for him and make the first move...

...He's thrown, too, by Alec's THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 35 lower-class status and unashamed physicality...

...We know he's thinking about Maurice, but this doesn't keep Ivory—whose touch is usually so certain—from unnecessarily splicing in a shot of Maurice back at Cambridge (looking, alas, very dopey and unappealing...

...Take his attitude toward the poor...

...Nor is it clear what his real feelings are toward the young lady that he marries...

...Then Clive quietly closes the shutters—on his past, on Maurice, on the dark and uncertain and perilous night...

...But nothing works...

...But later on in the film, just before his involvement with Alec, and apparently in order for his initial anguish over the gamekeeper's social inferiority and his subsequent distrust of the young man to make sense, the script puts in his mouth a few strongly condescending words about the lower orders...

...Maurice, then, is positively riddled with flaws...

...Their affair is neither interesting nor convincing...

...Even a 1 reader who ordinarily casts a jaundiced eye upon the critical encomia quoted in movie advertisements cannot help but be given pause by the quotations featured in the twenty-inch, four-column ads that the Merchant-Ivory people have been running in the New York Times and other papers: "A masterpiece...

...reachy as he is, though, he's no 1 more preachy than the filmmakers, who too often seem less interested in telling their story than in scoring easy points against the foolish prejudices of a society that no longer exists...

...Part of the reason for this is the rapid-fire presentation of the opening sequences...

...Ivory keeps making abrupt leaps of several months—one moment it's 1909, the next 1910—and too often, at the beginning of a sequence, he plunges straight into the action without a moment's foreplay...

...Presently he cements this resolution by getting married...

...He's supposed to be a chameleon of a character who turns speedily from a polite and apparently straight young man into a cocky homosexual comfortable with his sexuality...

...Fade out...

...rr o watch this movie is to be nagged 1. at by a hundred little questions, doubts, irritations...

...At the end of the film, having just learned that Maurice is in love with his gamekeeper, Clive stands pensively at his bedroom window, staring out into the dark, his sweet little wife resting her head lovingly, wonderingly, on his shoulder...

...Wilby, as it happens, has no charisma and little charm, and he's not...

...Resolution finally arrives, however, in the form of Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves), the earthy young gamekeeper on Clive's estate, who, during one of Maurice's frequent visits, climbs up to his second-story bedroom in the middle of the night and throws his arms around him...

...So which is it, anyway—snob or democrat...

...It's the British equivalent of white Americans' romantic image of blacks as sensuous savages...

...In any event, that it takes the Risley trial to make Clive realize what he's risking by being involved with Maurice—and that he so quickly undergoes a complete reversal of attitude in this regard—is thoroughly unbelievable...

...He's there to make us feel superior, virtuous, open-minded...

...Once again Maurice finds himself being flabbergasted by a young man's embrace...

...Desperate to rid himself of his homosexuality, he sees a hypnotherapist (Ben Kingsley) and pleads with the family doctor (Denholm Elliott) for an explanation, a "cure," for these longings that dare not speak their name...

...He has real urgency and passion...

...But Clive, embarrassed at what he has done, thinks Maurice is just trying to be gracious...

...and then, before we can get to know either of them, it's suddenly months later, and they're best friends...

...How much are the boys' mothers aware of, for example (in contemporary jargon: what do they know and when did they know it...

...Is he really as capable of heterosexual as he is of homosexual passion, or is he just faking it...

...The more one thinks of it, in fact, the less one realizes one knows about the people in this film...

...One has no sense of what their affair is like—of the feel of it, the way it develops...

...Everything goes smoothly until the Viscount Risley (Mark Tandy), an old Cambridge friend (based on Lytton Strachey), is arrested, tried, and incarcerated for kissing a bellhop...

...If Maurice's affair with Alec is more compelling, it's because Graves is a very good actor...

...Whereas Maurice and Clive remain to the endsomething of a muddle and a mystery, Alec is utterly comprehensible, a far more sympathetic character—a more believable human being—than either of them...

...To be fair, insofar as this sort of thinking is concerned, the film is perfectly faithful to the sensibility of Forster, who, after making the discovery that the common folk had sexual organs too, got into the habit of writing about democracy as if he'd invented it himself...

...These developments throw Maurice into a tizzy...

...Does he love her...

...View (to my mind, the best film of that year...

...He puts a mustache on Maurice immediately after he leaves college, then takes it off after a couple of years (though partway through the mustache-wearing period, in a fleeting boxing scene that was obviously shot at the same time as a longer, and later, boxing sequence, Maurice is suddenly, briefly clean-shaven...

...To be sure, many of the supporting characters in Maurice aren't there to think or feel anything at all, but simply to spoutremarks which we are meant either to applaud or to jeer at...

...and then a new sequence fades in, and Clive is in close-up, sitting at Maurice's feet, mumbling something (I think it was "Have you ever been in love...

...not until Maurice climbs into his second-story bedroom window in the middle of the night, awakens him, plants a kiss on his mouth, and climbs back out the window does Clive believe that Maurice truly loves him...

...0 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988...

...In any event, I do look forward to the next production by Ivory, Merchant, and (it is to be hoped) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who usually writes these things but sat this one out in favor of Ivory and a young collaborator named Kit Hesketh-Harvey (a recent Cambridge graduate...

...they come across like a couple of boys playing grown-up...

...Maurice is confused, not sure whether to return or to spurn Clive's embrace...

...one knows exactly what he is going through...

...One becomes involved, moved, shaken" (Mike McGrady, Newsday...

...the script is both literate and powerful...

...The reasons begin with Maurice himself, and with the actor who portrays him...

...They see each other frequently, often in the company of other young men and women, neither flaunting their sexuality nor hiding their closeness...

...There's no egalitarian like an Oxbridge egalitarian...

...Based on the posthumously published novel by E. M. Forster (another of whose novels, of course, was the basis for A Room with a View), Maurice is the story of Maurice Hall (James Wilby), who in 1909, while a second-year student at King's College, Cambridge, befriends an extremely rich and strikingly handsome fellow studentnamed Clive Durham (Hugh Grant...

...and the actors seem little short of perfection...

...We have no bead on these boys at this point—it's all happening too fast, in too much of a Monarch Notes manner...

...They become very close...

...When he sneaks into the courtroom just in time to hear the verdict at Risley's trial, the worried look that comes over his face is of near-Kabuki broadness, and he skulks out of the courtroom like the villain in a nineteenth-century melodrama...

...Ha ha...

...Especially on eligible young ladies: several scenes in the film exist for no other purpose, it would appear, than to bid us laugh at some poor girl who is obviously smitten with Clive and trying her best to win him, unaware that he's already taken by the man at his side...