PG | 2 h 14 min | Drama | 1993
At the British country house Darlington Hall, fastidious butler Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) serves his 1930s’ master, Lord Darlington (James Fox). Equally efficient but unfussy housekeeper Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), fancies Stevens, but he’s cold to her. His identity, as butler, overpowers his identity as a man, a son, and a free-thinking citizen. Devastated, she leaves for better pay, and another potential partner, elsewhere.
Similarly, Darlington’s identity as an aristocrat overpowers his duty as a post-World War I British subject to fight fascism. He reckons that an international conference he hosts will, through his pacifism, preempt another war. At the conference, American congressman Lewis (Christopher Reeve) warns against embracing a Germany rising from the Versailles Treaty’s ruinous wake. Only after World War II proves him wrong does Darlington bemoan his blindness.
Stevens’s blindness, too, seems inherited. His father, Stevens Sr. (Peter Vaughan) allowed his identity as a butler for 54 years to crowd out his identity as a husband and parent. As Stevens Sr. dies, father and son regret their alienation from others and themselves.
Time Goes By
Director James Ivory depicts the passage of time by screening cooks, scullery boys, gardeners, gamekeepers, and footmen fading in and out of shots as they hurry up the splendid staircases and down the capacious corridors of Darlington Hall. Backstories spanning decades drip through Ms. Thompson’s voiceover, reading Kenton’s handwritten updates to Stevens. Frenetic pre-war (and less frenetic post-war) flashbacks cut in and out of the even slower, but no less engrossing, 1950s’ narrative.
Mr. Ivory’s film is about timing, whether confronting fascists or holding someone’s outstretched hand before it’s too late. It proposes that romance implies love, truth, freedom, and beauty; romanticism, only the illusion, often the exclusion, of all four. If anything, it’s fear that rules Stevens.
Stevens fears love. Interviewing Kenton for her job, he forbids “gentleman callers.” When she brightens his room with flowers, he prefers to “keep distractions to a minimum.” He fears truth, denying his aging father’s obvious difficulties, while Kenton recommends lightening the old man’s duties. And he fears freedom; the little that others claim and the even less that he allows. He denies himself freedom to show (or receive) affection, and freedom to protest, even privately, Darlington’s dabbling in diplomacy. For all his loyalty, when charges of Nazi appeasement darken Darlington’s name, he disavows him.
A James Ivory Classic
The film’s point? Only love, truth, freedom, and beauty matter. Everything else comprises “distractions,” to be kept “to a minimum.” The likes of Darlington, Stevens, and Stevens Sr. are conscientious enough to do things others balk at, whether running international affairs or a household bigger than a hotel. But so caught up in what must be done, they’re not asking whether it must. Atypical, or contrary, identities refute them.In an era run by men, Kenton’s loving nature gifts her truth. She sees these three men as they are—decent, dignified, but brittle and blind to the needs of others and their own. Lewis is American, but his love for freedom gifts him truths about fascist Europe that Europeans miss. He prefers America’s “politics of reality” to Anglo-French “gentlemen” politics. Too young to speak above his station in a conference of old men, Darlington’s godson, Mr. Cardinal (Hugh Grant), too, spots the truth: Germany’s exploiting his godfather’s naiveté.
Stevens is first authentic when faced with the prospect of Kenton leaving. To please his German friends, Darlington has him fire Jewish-refugee cleaning maids. Livid, Kenton wants out, on principle, but has nowhere to go, “I’m a coward … frightened of leaving … that’s all my high principles are worth.” With pauses long enough to serve a quick meal in, you can see Mr. Hopkins, as Stevens, squeezing his words out. Terrified of feeling weakness let alone showing it, his reassurance is heartbreaking because it is distant, “You mean a great deal to this house.”
What of beauty in doing unimportant chores? Surely, there’s beauty when people excel at the humblest tasks? But, as Stevens learns, “polished brass, brilliant silver, mahogany shining like a mirror” can fade into an empty ugliness, without truth and love and freedom lending them lasting beauty.
Ironically, here, it’s the American who saves Darlington Hall from demolition.
