Good Housekeeping: “The Remains of the Day”

The lineage of The Remains of the Day is unusual. It began as a 1989 novel by Kazuo Ishigoro, a native Japanese who was raised in England. Though Ishigoro’s first two novels deal with the nation he had left at age 5, The Remains of the Day marked his turn toward strictly British subject matter. Following the massive success of this novel, he has explored science-fiction material (Never Let Me Go), dabbled in screenwriting (for the Oscar-nominated Living) and won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, among other major honors.

 The screen version of The Remains of the Day, released in 1993, started out (to my surprise) as a Mike Nichols project with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. When the film passed into the hands of the Merchant-Ivory team, Pinter severed ties, though apparently some of his work was used, while Nichols stayed involved as a producer. The resulting film benefits from Ismail Merchant’s, James Ivory’s and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s comfort with literary adaptations, as well as their impressive visual sense. A film about a head butler and a housekeeper numbering their days in service to Lord Darlington requires a functioning manor house as its setting. The Merchant-Ivory reputation was such (after the artistic success of films like A Room with a View and Howard’s End)  that the filmmakers were able to persuade previously reluctant property owners to open their doors to cast and crew. Clearly, the resulting film is a triumph of logistics. Several country homes were used in combination, including Dyrham Park for the house’s exterior and driveway; Powderham Castle for some gracious public rooms and a spectacular turquoise stairway; Badminton House for servants’ quarters and a conservatory. On screen it all looks like one impressive stately mansion.

 Though Ishigoro wrote his novel in the first person, from the perspective of a starchy and deeply traditional butler, the screenplay’s basically third-person point of view hardly detracts. In Anthony Hopkins’ performance we well understand how much Mr. Stevens is bound by his own past, as well as by an unrelenting sense of duty to those he sees as his betters. Playing opposite him is the always convincing Emma Thompson, as a housekeeper who would like to be braver than she is. These two would make for a natural pairing, except that their basic timidity holds them back. This is best acknowledged in what the filmmakers call “the book scene,” in which Miss Kenyon briefly sets aside her usual decorum to playfully wrestle away from Stevens the mysterious book he is reading in his rare off-hours. The fact that he rebuffs her, for no very good reason, is a wonderful indicator of his habitual strait-laced outlook (is he deeply repressed, or just shy?).

 I first saw this film when it was in theatres, and best remembered it for that very English sense of stiff-upper-lip self-denial. What I’d forgotten completely is how much the film has to say about the politics of the pre-World War II era. Lord Darlington, it appears, has a sentimental affection for German culture. Though at base he’s a well-meaning man, his money and social position help him prop up the reputation of the Nazi party within his own country. What’s deeply disturbing is that Stevens, as his loyal retainer, will not permit himself to think independently of the master of the house, even when the lives of others (like two Jewish immigrant girls in his kitchen) are at stake. So he loses not only a chance at love but also, ultimately, his self-respect. A sad ending for one who puts duty before all else.

 

Looking Back in Admiration . . . or Anger

Yesterday the airwaves were full of the news that Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s reigning monarch for a remarkable seventy years, had passed away at 96. Though the British monarchy certainly has its detractors, the loss of a woman marked by dignity and a strong sense of obligation to the commonweal was regarded by most of the world as a poignant moment. Looking back on her ascension to the throne as a 25-year-old in 1952, I realize that her reign coincided almost exactly with something brand-new on the British stage: the Angry Young Man.

 It all started with a 1956 play by John Osborne, one that ushered in plays, films, and fiction marked by a furious disdain for the status quo. Alan Sillitoe, who was to write such lacerating works as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, said of Osborne that he "didn't contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up." Osborne’s semi-autobiographical Look Back in Anger, disdained by most critics but hailed by a prescient few as the shape of things to come, focuses in on the crumbling marriage of a young working-class man, Jimmy Porter, and his more pedigreed wife, Alison. Jimmy has managed to get an education, but resents everything about the world of his betters. Much of the play (set in a squalid Midland flat) features his sometimes comic, sometimes cruel diatribes against his wife, his sweet-natured buddy, the social status quo, and everything else that crosses his path. The film version, released in 1959, featured rising star Richard Burton, along with Claire Bloom and an expanded cast of characters. It garnered an X rating from the British censors, and—though nominated for a few British awards—made absolutely no dent on Hollywood.

 I hadn’t realized that the play was filmed again, for television, in 1989. It was helmed by Judi Dench, in her only directorial outing, and its stars included a then-married couple who were starting to make their own impact on theatre and film. In that same year, Branagh had both shot and starred in his stirring rendition of Shakespeare’s Henry V, scooping up his first two Oscar nominations (he won in 2022 for his Belfast screenplay). Thompson, newer to the big screen, would go on to win Oscars for acting (Howards End) and screenwriting (Sense and Sensibility). The Branagh/Thompson marriage, which led to several creative collaborations on stage and screen, ended in 1995, apparently because Branagh had moved on to Helena Bonham-Carter, in a dynamic that had some parallels to Look Back in Anger. But what struck me was that both Branagh (born in 1960) and Thompson (1959) started their lives at a time when Look Back in Anger was galvanizing the art world.

 As Jimmy Porter, Branagh has the real goods. He’s funny; he’s angry; he’s constantly in motion. This production, which began on the British stage, is completely faithful to Osborne’s tiny cast and one-set location. There’s no room for fancy camera work, and everything depends on Branagh firmly holding our attention as he goes off onto his endless rants. And so he does. I’d like to say that his working-class roots, as seen in the autobiographical Belfast, make his a Jimmy Porter we believe through and through.

 Thompson, as the woebegone Alison, has the harder job, tamping down her vibrant personality to persuade us that she’s willing to remain Jimmy’s doormat. But the toughest role belongs to Helena Charles (Siobhan Redmond), the posh friend of Alison’s who shows up at midpoint and makes some bewildering choices. Still, this remains a mesmerizing production.

 

At Wits’ End: The Poignant Brilliance of “Wit”

The 1995 play called Wit, written by a teacher who’d once worked in a research hospital, was  a triumph for South Coast Repertory, the premiere theatre in SoCal’s Orange County. When Margaret Edson, who had never written a play, sent her script to 60 of America’s regional theatre companies, most turned it down flat. But South Coast Rep saw in this story of a lauded college professor facing aggressive experimental treatment for ovarian cancer a promising stage vehicle. SCR’s production went on to win major awards from the Los Angeles theatre community, after which the play moved east to New Haven and New York. There it swept up additional honors, including the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

 The intimacy of Wit’s drama, along with the bleakness of its subject matter, meant that Hollywood didn’t rush to snap up the film rights. But in 2001 HBO put its clout behind a TV movie, securing the services of Mike Nichols as director (two years before his triumphant TV staging of Angels in America), and Emma Thompson in the central role of Professor Vivian Bearing, with Nichols and  Thompson collaborating on adapting Edson’s play to the small screen. By all accounts they didn’t change much. The play’s flashbacks to classroom memories and its surreal shifts in perspective (with the ailing, now bald-headed professor sometimes standing in for her younger self) remain gloriously intact.

 What makes Wit more than a weepie is its sophisticated handling of the leading role. Professor Bearing, age 53, is far more than a victim of an unrelenting disease and a sometimes unfeeling medical establishment. In her college classroom, where she lectured undergraduates on the subtleties of 17^th century English poetry, she has been a bit of a tyrant, though one who hangs tough out of respect for the poets she introduces. It’s no accident that her specialty is the metaphysical verse of John Donne, who was by turns a bon vivant, a lover, a churchman, and a deep thinker obsessed with a precise use of language. One of Donne’s great themes is the meaning of death, as seen in the famous “Death Be Not Proud,” a sonnet that becomes in this drama an ongoing source of debate. (Even its punctuation, it seems, proves controversial.) Donne also famously weighed the connection between soul and body, which underscores the play’s juxtaposition of a woman concerned for her essence and the medical team’s determination, at all costs, to save her corporeal self. One of the drama’s most powerful moments comes when a sympathetic young oncologist who once earned an A- in Professor Bearing’s poetry course now seeks to overturn every ethical consideration in the name of medical science.

 Years ago I saw Wit on the stage and was duly impressed. But Nichols’ TV version benefits from the heightened realism the camera brings, ushering us into a realistic hospital environment and forcing us to watch, up close, as Professor Bearing’s body begins to shut down. In a way that the stage doesn’t much allow, it rubs our noses in the indignities of illness—the ungainly feet-in-stirrups position that most women (but not men) have experienced, the gut-searing bouts of nausea, the casual assaults on basic modesty, the final desperate need for simple solace. One of the play’s most touching moments comes when a former mentor, stopping by to see the patient on her way to visit a great-grandchild, forgets about intellectual rigor and soothes Professor Bearing with a simple children’s book. Mike Nichols’ talent as a director of comedy extends here to the human comedy in all its poignancy.