A butler who sacrificed body and soul to service in the years leading up to World War II realizes too late how misguided his loyalty was to his lordly employer.
Director: James Ivory
Stars: Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, James Fox, Hugh Grant.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107943/
Purchased recently during a shopping browse at a particular seller.
I've heard of Merchant/Ivory films, of course, but have never rated one, and probably have never seen one before. This one happens to have the highest IMDb rating of Ivory's dir. credits.
This should be in my wheelhouse. One of the plot threads is that the butler's master is one of the British aristocrats pushing the government into appeasing Hitler to avoid war (and because some actually support Hitler.) In an extra feature, AH says the Treaty of Versailles, which capped WW1, were too restrictive. I didn't study that enough to opine. This does portray the aristocrat (JF) ambiguously; he seems well-intentioned, which is the kindest way to interpret the Appeasement. But that doesn't really give me any new insights. (Chilling moment when the Germans arrive at the estate and case the artwork while waiting to be greeted by the host.)
I find the threads of the film overly complicated. We start with a voiceover by ET of a letter she wrote to AH some 20+ years after the events where most of the film is set, and when we have flashes forward, the characters are not aged enough to make it easy to distinguish where we are.
The extra features support the synopsis above, but I didn't get that from the film. My interpretation leans more toward AH's discomfort with having been part of the appeasement scandal (his master was not tried for treason, but some people think he should have been), which strangers inquire about incessantly. To extend that to his LIFE having been wasted as a servant (albeit the top servant in the household) seems excessive. If we list all the occupations where a life has been wasted, that would cover most of them.
So the writers/producers/et al intended to attack a way of life (landed gentry), which has been nearly destroyed by changing times, particularly the dissolution of the British empire. Not sure why they felt the need.
HG was an interesting character, onscreen very little. We meet him as a young innocent, but during the plans for Appeasement, he realizes the dangers of those efforts. We also get the events of normal life (ET's in particular) proceeding despite the momentous historic events occuring at the estate. The servants are accustomed to important people being there, so they pay no mind to the significance that we recognize with hindsight.
The strife between ET and AH, and AH's emotional repression, are the primary subjects of the film, but are diminished in importance by the Appeasement plot thread. So I found the film confusing, making me wonder what I'm supposed to follow and what I'm supposed to get out of it, especially since what I _did_ get out of it is not what was the creators intended.
Rated 7.9 (57,116)
Columbia +, dir. Ivory; 6
