Saturday, January 21, 2006
GLOSSY
Take a good story by E. M. Forster and give it to Merchant-Ivory, the producing-directing couple and get some good Brit actors and you have a Best 1176 NYTimes Film.
They filmed five of the novels:A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Maurice and this one.
We had seen it before but it felt new. It has been 14 years.
The production is beautiful, of course: wildly so. It is amazing that they could put so much detailed business into these films; the street scenes, the country houses, the crowd scenes.
I suppose that today they would do it digitally.
The acting is impeccable, if a bit distant; Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham-Carter. All very good as well as the wonderful character actors.
In any event, there is a certain stiffness to any Merchant-Ivory enterprise which is inevitable. Maybe it is all the precise detail. A little sloppiness here and there might actually help. Even the lower classes have extremely stage dressed looks to them as well as the costumes.
There I said it.
Sometimes I think that to dis this team is like farting in church, but there it is.
Pooot.
That is why I will give it a 4 out of Netflix5.
Passage is the only other Foster/Merchant-Ivory film on the Best list. We will have to wait until the 'P's. Perhaps I will do a fest with all of them some day. I will get my stiff upper lip ready.
