It’s a curse that befalls every great director: the synonymization of their name with whatever specific style audiences have supposedly come to expect from them. Typically, it’s a lazy reduction of certain attributes which, objectively, do actually apply to them and their work. Yes, Kurosawa did make several tough, masculine, stylized period action films but to describe him as that type of filmmaker is to dismiss the whimsy and lyricism found in works such as Dersu Uzala or Dreams. Yes, Lynch is rightly known for his eerie, enigmatic surrealism but to categorize his canon thusly is to omit the straightforward, compassionate simplicity of works like The Elephant Man or The Straight Story. And yes, the films of producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory are disproportionately focused on the lives of upper- or upper-middle-class white folks in the late-19th and early-20th centuries but the association inferred by the term “a Merchant/Ivory picture” with a kind of stuffy, dreary, Downton Abbey-esque melodrama is not only a snub to all the films this pair made that don’t fit that particular mold, it’s also a disservice to all the films to which such a designation might apply.
The Bostonians is often overlooked in discussions about the key Merchant/Ivory films. Critics and audiences tend to prefer their Oscar-winning Forster adaptations A Room with a View and Howards End, or their Ishiguro one The Remains of the Day. It doesn’t hold the same retrospective interest for many as their less-seen early works made in India and it doesn’t hold the same popularity as their better-seen late ‘80s/early ‘90s works. Upon release, critics considered it flat, even boring; lead Vanessa Redgrave, then still something of a pariah figure in Hollywood following her controversial Oscar acceptance speech in 1978, hadn’t starred in an American release for five years and many weren’t especially enthusiastic about her return. Not even the presence of Superman himself, Christopher Reeve, in a leading role could ignite enough interest in The Bostonians to make a major success of it. In quick turnaround, Merchant/Ivory put out A Room with a View, their mainstream breakthrough, and The Bostonians was all too quickly forgotten about.
Thankfully, with time comes perspective – all the intimations created by prominence, preference and profitability loom little over the merits of any work of art with enough space between debut and appraisal to give them the objective assessment they deserve. And The Bostonians is richly deserved of reassessment – it’s a wondrous film, crafted out of an assemblage of exquisite moments, beautifully designed and sensitively staged. The performances are magnificently subtle, from Reeve’s slyly charismatic turn as the chauvinistic suitor Basil Ransom, to Madeleine Potter’s nuanced, expressive work as Verena Tarrant, a young woman at a fraught crossroads in her life. Redgrave still towers above all her castmates, though, in one of her finest performances among a veritable litany of finery in her repertoire: her progressive spinster, Olive Chancellor, is at once insular yet vibrant, gentle yet spiky, unable to give full voice to her needs and desires yet equally unable to suppress them. This most remarkable actor doesn’t so much resolve all the potential contradictions in this complex character as she does merge them, effectively, in a single dramatic expression. She’s that most impressive of things in art: an artist who can communicate seemingly limitless ideas or emotions in a single gesture.
There may be no better encapsulation by an actor of the nature of a Merchant/Ivory work than this. It’s easy, looking at the winsome white costuming or the hazy, sun-dappled cinematography of this film, to write it off as just another middlebrow romantic period drama, the sort of film folks tend to expect when they read that term “a Merchant/Ivory picture.” True, it’s subtle, gentle, reticent toward brash or garish outbursts of political or emotional fervor. And yet it is precisely such fervors that fuel The Bostonians, since it is one of the producer/director pair’s most open, direct films, literally textualizing the political progressiveness that has always characterized their work. In India, they examined race, caste and gender; in England, class and status. In The Bostonians, on American shores, they position as their lead character a women’s suffrage leader and make entirely plain that which the writer of the film’s source novel, Henry James, perhaps never even implied: that Olive is a lesbian and that the dilemma faced by Verena, choosing between following Basil or Olive, is not just a political dilemma but a romantic one too. Indeed, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplay is clearer and blunter about Basil’s sinister conservatism than James ever was. Jhabvala suppresses his standing in the narrative too, placing greater focus on the women, their personal drives and internal dialogues being considerably richer.
Altogether, The Bostonians is a deceptively edgy proposition: sterner and less vibrant than its source but also more compassionate. Its distinctly feminine sensibilities – the visual softness, the fragmentation of narrative focus, the graceful temporal elisions as the film almost blithely cuts from one scene to another – are offset by a certain curtness, a refusal to linger on grand emotional moments that both recurs throughout many Ivory films and is quite true to the period literature from which those films are adapted. One feels as though his films will indulge a little more in the complexities of their characters’ emotional quagmires but Ivory steadfastly declines to do so, yet his impeccable sensitivity for the earnestness of those emotions ensures that they ring out not just through each subsequent scene but also long after the credits have rolled. To equate films such as this, or Quartet, Maurice or Mr. & Mrs. Bridge with the lesser productions they’ve perhaps inspired – again I bring Downton Abbey up – is thus not merely a slight misrepresentation but a total one. Where such imitators belabor their facile, crudely engineered sentiments amid an overcooked stew of implausible narrative machinations, Merchant/Ivory films belabor nothing, engineer their sentiments with care and sympathy and never resort to lazy twists and turns to sustain audience interest. If this aided in preventing The Bostonians from achieving the success it deserved upon release, it doesn’t prevent it from deserving it – it’s precisely why it deserves it. Now, nearly 40 years after it was first seen (by too few), there should be nothing stopping the curious, intelligent cinephile from seeking out this utterly terrific, still-underseen “Merchant/Ivory picture.”
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