Maurice (15.)
Directed by James Ivory.
Starring James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow, Billie Whitelaw, Ben Kingsley, Barry Foster, and Phoebe Nicholls. 140 mins.
Watching his rather splendid turn as Jeremy Thorpe on the telly recently, my wife was shocked at the idea of Hugh Grant playing a gay man. I had to explain to her that being posh and pretty and, most of all British, his youthful days - like any other performer so afflicted - would inevitably involve playing Oxbridge educated homosexuals, probably in one of Merchant/ Ivory's sluggish tales of tortured fops. So convincing was the typecasting that it wasn't until the Divine Brown arrest that people grudging conceded that might actually be straight in real life.
Maurice was a product of the great E.M. Forster boom of the early 80s to early 90s, began by David Lean's A Passage to India, in whose wake Ivory & Merchant managed to spin out three films from his novels. In this follow up to A Room With A View, taken from a posthumous novel, the title character (Wilby) tries to discretely follow his true nature at a time when it was punishable by total disgrace and a sentence of a few years hard labour.
This re-release must be prompted in part by the renewed interest in the work of James Ivory after his Oscar-winning script for Call Me By Your Name. This is one of the few films he directed that doesn't have a carefully knitted script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Ivory wrote it with Kit Hesketh-Harvey. The sense of paranoia is well captured but it does amble along, born of a sense of privilege that upper-class suffering is all that is required without much attempt at drama.
Directed by James Ivory.
Starring James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow, Billie Whitelaw, Ben Kingsley, Barry Foster, and Phoebe Nicholls. 140 mins.
Watching his rather splendid turn as Jeremy Thorpe on the telly recently, my wife was shocked at the idea of Hugh Grant playing a gay man. I had to explain to her that being posh and pretty and, most of all British, his youthful days - like any other performer so afflicted - would inevitably involve playing Oxbridge educated homosexuals, probably in one of Merchant/ Ivory's sluggish tales of tortured fops. So convincing was the typecasting that it wasn't until the Divine Brown arrest that people grudging conceded that might actually be straight in real life.
Maurice was a product of the great E.M. Forster boom of the early 80s to early 90s, began by David Lean's A Passage to India, in whose wake Ivory & Merchant managed to spin out three films from his novels. In this follow up to A Room With A View, taken from a posthumous novel, the title character (Wilby) tries to discretely follow his true nature at a time when it was punishable by total disgrace and a sentence of a few years hard labour.
This re-release must be prompted in part by the renewed interest in the work of James Ivory after his Oscar-winning script for Call Me By Your Name. This is one of the few films he directed that doesn't have a carefully knitted script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Ivory wrote it with Kit Hesketh-Harvey. The sense of paranoia is well captured but it does amble along, born of a sense of privilege that upper-class suffering is all that is required without much attempt at drama.
