End of an Era

What were we talking about?: Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes) and Sofia (Natasha Richardson) in The White Countess. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

Over the last 44 years, director James Ivory and his recently deceased life partner, producer Ismail Merchant, built one of the most recognizable brands in modern cinema. Their newest and final collaboration, The White Countess, concerns a blind American (Ralph Fiennes) and a Russian aristocrat (Natasha Richardson, never better, never more radiant) who open a nightclub amid the turbulence of 1930s Shanghai. Merchant Ivory’s valedictory effort shows off their usual strengths: the film is pretty to look at and employs top British actors in all the key roles. The White Countess is as good a picture as the couple has produced in years; nonetheless, it marks the end of a franchise that was better at atmosphere than it was at storytelling, better at producing a marketable type of beauty than competent films.

Merchant was born in Bombay, Ivory hailed from Berkeley, Calif.; both shared an acute case of anglophilia, distilling a nostalgic vision of Englishness. Merchant and Ivory began making art-house films in the U.K. in the early 1960s and broke through in North America in 1985, with A Room with a View; based on the novel by E.M. Forster, it told the story of a young English gentlewoman (Helena Bonham Carter) whose passions are unleashed by a trip to Italy.

Merchant Ivory’s depiction of England was one of sun-soaked barley fields and ancient oak trees, bespectacled literary fops wearing bespoke suits (Daniel Day-Lewis in Room) and intrepid spinster travellers in free-flowing skirts and high-collared blouses (Judi Dench in Room). This hoary vision annoyed many Britons, while enchanting North Americans. Merchant Ivory hired many young, talented English actors, many of whom have gone on to busy international careers (most notably Day-Lewis, Bonham Carter, Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves).

Merchant and Ivory chose to depict pre-First World War Britain so glowingly because they loathed what the country has become. “England has been inherited by the lower classes who talk about making money and football,” Merchant once told London’s Sunday Telegraph. “An Englishman's word is no longer his bond.”

Where the grass is always greener: From left, George Emerson (Julian Sands), Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Lucy Honeychurch (Helen Bonham Carter) in Room with a View. Courtesy Warner Home Video.

In the final analysis, Merchant and Ivory are the Crabtree & Evelyn of filmmaking. Liking Merchant Ivory films has become akin to enjoying tennis or classical music. Never mind that you haven’t seen a Merchant Ivory film — or watched an entire tennis match or sat through a symphony — in years; you identified yourself long ago as the sort of person who likes Merchant Ivory movies, and you’re sticking to it.

Despite having produced only a handful of decent films (and many barking dogs), the duo succeeded in making their double-barrelled name a latter-day shibboleth. Fans are part of an international tribe of like-minded individuals: well-educated, sensitive and, more than anything else, upper crust (or, at least, aspiring to be upper crust). “Do you like Merchant Ivory?” has become a question much like Aimez-vous Brahms? — a reference to a Françoise Sagan novel that won’t be wasted on Merchant Ivory lovers.

Their films usually have plots that float about aimlessly and dialogue that rings false and pretentious. (Much of the blame for this rests with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who wrote the scripts for 23 of the films.) Although the movies are informed by an effortless cultural sophistication, they lack a parallel political sophistication and get downright clumsy whenever they try to approach public issues. Merchant Ivory productions attempt to escape from the hurly-burly; they are about waking up from the nightmare of history, rather than engaging with it.

Case in point: the execrable (and typical) Jefferson in Paris (1995). Thomas Jefferson (Nick Nolte) comes to Paris as the American ambassador and promptly falls for an artsy Englishwoman (Greta Scacchi). As the affair gains steam, so does the revolutionary movement. The filmmakers drop in a few hilariously decorous riots here and there, between aristocratic soirées, but they are made to seem beside the point. (Commoners don't get much screen time in Merchant Ivory flicks.) Meanwhile, Nolte and Scacchi, a pair of accomplished acting pros, gamely wade through spectacularly wooden dialogue:

     He: “You appear all clarity and light, of this world, not the next.”
     She: “It is true I was born in the sun and I can't live without it.”

Enter Thandie Newton, as Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemmings, who has to play at once a budding heroine of the freedom movement and an insipid, yessuh-Massah housegirl. As the film goes on, Sally gradually supplants the Englishwoman in her master’s affections. Revolving wildly around this love triangle are Jefferson's intolerant daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow, more lumpen than usual), who may convert to Catholicism; Marie-Antoinette, playing at being a dairy maid; a hypnotist who puts hysterical courtiers under; and Monsieur Guillotin, who demonstrates a model of his decapitation device at a dinner party.

Big wigs: Richard Cosway (Simon Callow) and Maria Cosway (Greta Scacchi) in Jefferson in Paris. Courtesy Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

In short, the film is a mess. The characters are incoherent. One moment, Jefferson is a sneaky sex-hound, the next a high-minded idealist; he never feels at all human. The project’s politics are muddled: Jefferson’s views on slavery are even more confused than the historical record reveals. Plus, the filmmakers don’t even let Greta Scacchi have a ripped-bodice sex scene, which is like giving Pavarotti a non-singing part.

Merchant and Ivory did, however, bring certain second-tier strengths to all their work: an impressionist's visual sensibility, a fashion historian’s love of period finery and a real appreciation of literary classics written in the understated Edwardian vein. Their best films – The Forster trio of A Room With a View, Maurice (1987) and Howards End (1992), as well as the neo-Edwardian The Remains of the Day (1993) — provoke a sort of restful ease, the aah of coming into an art gallery, which is rare enough to be welcome. Right from the credit sequences in these films, we feel that we are in a civilized space; not even Greta Scacchi would dare disrobe here.

These films all dramatize the struggle to overcome repression, to come out (as whatever you are). In the 1980s and early 1990s, these period pieces spoke to a society at the tail end of the battle against repression. In their subtle way, the films contributed to this last great push for freer self-expression, which largely accounts for their popularity among suburban bohemians. Twenty years later, with everyone out (as whatever they are), the message seems quaint and irrelevant. We’ve jettisoned our repressed upbringings; now what? The films end where our real lives now begin.

Perhaps Merchant Ivory’s greatest contribution has been recognizing and championing literary talent. But if their book picks are generally first rate, they’ve often failed to translate good novels into quality films. The Forster books, as well as Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, were easy adaptations: both writers pen naturalistic, evocative dialogue and situate their characters in picturesque locales. The franchise invariably made a hash of harder-to-transmute works, utterly squelching the bright airiness of Diane Johnson’s comedy of manners, Le Divorce (2003), and getting lost in Henry James’s labyrinthine prose in The Bostonians (1984) and The Golden Bowl (2000).

Thankfully, the script for The White Countess comes from Ishiguro, one of the most disciplined writers at work today. (He based the story very loosely on Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel The Diary of a Mad Old Man, as well as his own grandfather’s stories of 1930s Shanghai.) The American diplomat played by Fiennes loses his family and his eyesight in a terrorist attack. Understandably embittered, he leaves affairs of state behind to open the nightclub the White Countess, which, like a Merchant Ivory film, offers a getaway from the rough-and-tumble world outside.

At one point in the film, the well-dressed, distinguished American sits on a barstool, sighing reflectively. “Out there,” he says, “there is chaos, mistrust, deceit.” This is an economical description of the raw materials of real drama. Sadly, Merchant Ivory’s films never could deal with such messy stuff. In the movie, the nightclub has a good run, but must close when the Japanese invade the city. The White Countess is certainly a stylish place to hang out, but, in a real crisis, it shuts down. It doesn’t serve up the good, stiff drink you need.

The White Countess opens Jan. 13 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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