TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/031692/0316420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.5 KB | 161 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 72

Doing It Right the Hard Way


The radiant Howards End caps 30 years of Merchant Ivory
filmmaking: on the cheap, but with style

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles


    Their company name, Merchant Ivory, is discreetly
suggestive, like the first line of a haiku, or like their films.
Merchant (Ismail, 55, Bombay-born): the getter, the peddler, the
producer, the indefatigable fund raiser from private and
government pockets in the U.S., Britain, India and Japan. Ivory
(James, 63, Berkeley-born): the begetter, the director of films
as smooth, durable, precious and endangered as an elephant's
tusk.

    With novelist-screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 64 -- a
German-born Polish Jew who escaped to England when she was 11,
then lived in Delhi with her Indian architect husband for 25
years until relocating in New York City in 1976 -- Merchant and
Ivory form what amounts to a nuclear family, a multinational
corporation and a tight little island of quality cinema. "We're
like the government of the U.S. sometimes," notes Ivory as the
trio sits in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel to discuss their
new film, Howards End. "I'm the President, he's Congress, and
she's the Supreme Court." The usually taciturn Prawer Jhabvala
demurs, "They're more like Laurel and Hardy." Or the fabulous
Baker boys, harmonizing from one dicey project to the next, with
Prawer Jhabvala as their stern muse.

    They are also the industry's longest-running creative
partnership; the Guinness Book of World Records says so. Thirty
years ago this month, Ivory began shooting The Householder,
which Merchant produced and Prawer Jhabvala scripted from her
novel. Columbia Pictures bought the rights for a pleasant piece
of change, and the company was launched. But not into the movie
mainstream. "Someone else would have gone and made a house in
the Bahamas and lived happily ever after," Merchant says. "But
we didn't do that. We put the money into our next film." And so
on and so on -- dollar by rupee by pound sterling by yen --
happily ever after.

    The triumvirate has collaborated on 15 films, many
dramatizing the abrasion of English and Indian cultures:
Shakespeare Wallah, The Guru, Autobiography of a Princess. But
the best-known Merchant Ivory movies could be called
Anglo-English: stately adaptations from Henry James (The
Europeans, The Bostonians), Jean Rhys (Quartet) and E.M. Forster
(A Room with a View and Maurice). With A Room with a View and
their handsomely managed compression of two Evan Connell novels
into Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), the team found a fresh,
elliptical vigor. Here were snapshots of family scenes that,
when flipped briskly, revealed society in bittersweet autumnal
splendor.

    Now Howards End, Forster's richest novel, has become
Merchant Ivory's finest film. Elegant and powerful,
accommodating collisions of class and temperament with the grace
of a perfect Edwardian hostess, Howards End is the work to which
all Merchant Ivory's other films have pointed and aspired.

    How modern, how very 1990s, the story of 1907 plays today.
It is about real estate, and failing insurance companies, and
the collision of feminism and domesticity, and the way the
upper class misuses and misunderstands the masses. Howards End
is a country home owned by the Wilcoxes, pompous Henry (Anthony
Hopkins) and ethereal Ruth (Vanessa Redgrave), and visited, on
crucial occasions, by the vivacious Schlegel sisters, Margaret
(Emma Thompson) and Helen (Helena Bonham Carter). The
friendship of Ruth and Margaret is the story's one pure and
uncomplicated love. But the fulcrum is Leonard Bast (Samuel
West), a clerk who dreams above his station, all the way to the
stars. He will discover that the barriers of class are higher
still, and that the playthings of the kind Schlegel sisters --
their books and furnishings -- can crush a working-class fellow
who has unruly aspirations.

    A delight of nearly any Ivory film is the ensemble of
actresses. In the lead, Thompson rises to the role's drama and
fairly skates on its ironic wit. She also displays the requisite
magic of a period heroine: by her radiant example, she teaches
the audience how a beautiful soul might behave. Bonham Carter,
who has appeared in four Forster-derived films, has never been
so fetching a presence: her hair a wild nest, her features
fiercely pre-Raphaelite. Redgrave is her usual revelation, this
time as a lady cocooned in elevated frailties. So slowly,
gently, gravely does she speak, she seems to be translating from
a rarefied emotional language that cannot quite find its English
equivalent. Yet she and the others are, variously, the ideal
vessels to translate Forster's visions of femininity to the
screen.

    Beginning with David Lean's A Passage to India in 1984,
moviemakers have plundered five of Forster's six novels. It is
odd that Forster, who lived into his 90s but wrote most of his
fiction in his 20s, should have taken so long to become a
cinematic cottage industry. But he was never one to make a
strong early impression. Author Michael Holroyd has this nice
description of the young novelist at Cambridge: "Of middle
height and ivory pale complexion . . ." -- we like the ivory;
did destiny choose his skin color? -- "he seemed to combine the
bashful demureness of a spinster with the more abstract
preoccupations of a don."

    This engaged reticence -- the acutely tuned disinterest of
an extraterrestrial observer who can be both amused and
obsessed by the drawling brutality of English manners -- informs
all of Forster's novels. It also makes Forster an apt source
for Merchant, Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala, three outsiders who
have lavished so much attention on British propriety.

    Merchant Ivory films have often been admired, and reviled,
for their dogged gentility, the Masterpiece theatricality of
their style. Even the soggy films proceed at a confidently
leisurely pace, as if Ivory realized that these days time is the
dearest commodity; only he can afford it. Happily, the breadth
of Howards End allows Ivory to indulge his visual whims -- the
riot of landscape, the open-air intimacy of a punt on a sylvan
stream -- while forcing him and Prawer Jhabvala to hone every
scene ruthlessly, to find economy in gesture. You get the sense
of an entire novel, its characters and character, unfolding in
140 minutes. Over the years, Prawer Jhabvala says modestly,
"I've gotten better at fitting scenes together, at moving the
action along. It's been a 30-year learning process, which is not
finished yet."

    They will keep working and learning on a slew of
tantalizing projects: adaptations of Prawer Jhabvala's novel
Three Continents and Thomas Keneally's The Playmaker; perhaps
an original, Jefferson in Paris, about the U.S. President when
he was ambassador to France. They will keep making films the
hard way, as a boutique operation surrounded by huge
conglomerates. (Howards End cost a niggardly $8 million.)
Merchant describes the process: "You put up the money for the
option, get the screenplay written, get the costs down. You
raise money for each particular stage as you go along. Yet you
retain the rights. You're working for yourself."

    And sometimes, as with Howards End, you may have a hit.
"Any film that succeeds is a major surprise," notes Ivory. "You
have to lie down for a while."

    "No," counters Merchant, Laurel to his partner's Hardy,
"you have to lie down."