Cultivated and flattered by Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites, he sponsors "international conferences" that will eventually lead to Darlington Hall being described as a traitor's nest. The lord (played by that most urbane and civilized actor James Fox) is not a worldly man (he even recruits Stevens to explain "about the birds the the bees" to a godson who is obviously far beyond a zoological approach to sex). We begin to understand the nature of Darlington's behavior. The motor journey unfolds, as incident and memory reveal one secret after another. We meet his father ( Peter Vaughan), himself a butler, who reared the son to a rigid idea of service - so rigid that when the father is actually dying upstairs, Stevens does not abandon his post at an important dinner party. She had not imagined he read romances! He only reads, he stiffly explains, to improve his vocabulary.ĭoes Stevens possess any ordinary human feelings? Quite possibly, but something has led him to bury them. She pursues him, cornering him, snatching the book away to find it is a best-selling romance. The most painful, and brilliant, shows Miss Kenton surprising Stevens in his room, reading a book. The film demonstrates this in a series of quiet, almost secretive scenes, in which she pushes, and he flees. Miss Kenton is clearly attracted to the butler, but he is terrified of intimacy, and sidesteps it through a fanatic devotion to his work. ![]() In a British country house of the period, the head butler and the housekeeper would have been equals, roughly speaking, each supervising the two major realms of service. The feelings, for example, that Stevens ( Anthony Hopkins) might be expected to feel for Miss Kenton ( Emma Thompson). After " A Room with a View" and " Howards End," they are at the height of their powers, taking us inside a society where tradition is valued, even at the cost of repressing normal human feelings. The movie has been made by the team of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. He was, as a dinner guest brutally informs him, an amateur, who should have left international relations to the professionals. In this he was not precisely evil he was deluded, short-sighted, easily persuaded by the pieties of genteel racism. The reality is that Lord Darlington, in the years before World War II, had great sympathy for Germany, and hoped to bring about a separate peace between Britain and the Nazis. So much of it takes place within Stevens' mind, and it is up to the reader to interpret what the butler remembers: To deduce reality through the filter of a narrow, single-minded man. "The Remains of the Day" is based on the Booker Prize novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I would have thought almost unfilmable, until I saw this film. And slowly we begin to realize that things were not as they seemed, that Darlington was not as wise as he thought, that Stevens was blind to the reality around him. ![]() Along the way, in flashback, we see his memories of the great days at the hall, when Lord Darlington played host to the world's leaders, and it seemed at times the future of Britain was being decided. "The Remains of the Day" tells the story of Stevens' trip to the sea, and what he finds there.
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