“Doesn’t it seem strange to you that she plays so beautifully? That Beethoven plays with such passion? And lives so quietly? I suspect that one day music and life will merge.”
The Reverend Mr. Beebe says this about Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View, but he could just as easily have been referring to James Ivory, the film’s now 96-year-old director. Ivory, a quiet, inquisitive child from Klamath Falls, Oregon, had deep feelings but found art as a way to express his emotions. And he was the exact opposite of his life and work partner, producer Ismail Merchant, impetuous and charismatic, able to take money from anyone and put on productions with the highest possible production value on the smallest available budget. Imagine Roger Corman if he had grown up in a Muslim family in India and devoted his life to thoughtful, sophisticated costume dramas.
In his documentary Merchant Ivory, Stephen Soucy pays tribute to this extraordinary duo, who went on to make Maurice, Howards End and The Remains of the Day. The film is full of affection and compassion for the lives they led – Ivory, although a pioneer of LGBT cinema, notably with 1987’s Maurice, rarely spoke publicly about his sexuality until 2017’s Call Me by Your Name, for which he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay – while admiration for their work is presented as self-evident. Perhaps Soucy is right: if you’ve already seen a documentary about Merchant Ivory Productions, you don’t need to be told that their films are great.
But this sloppy, scattered documentary, lacking the sophistication of Merchant Ivory’s own films, is a missed opportunity to explore Why Their films are great, but what exactly makes viewers keep coming back to them? That’s the problem again with Stephen Kijak’s 2023 documentary Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed – a lot of attention is paid to the personal lives of the protagonists, much less to why those protagonists were great artists.
The problem with “Merchant Ivory” is that while it identifies all the ingredients that made their great films, it doesn’t so much describe the precise alchemy of how those elements came together to create something extraordinary. Soucy has interviewed dozens of cast and crew members from their films (perhaps too many) and gets great moments about what it would have been like to be on the set of Merchant Ivory: Ismail Merchant himself cooking for all the meals (to save money); Ivory’s low-key instructions to his actors; Merchant worrying that Ivory is taking too long to set up a shot and yelling at him, “Shoot, James! Shoot!”
In one of the new interviews Soucy conducted, Hugh Grant talks about the joy of working on Maurice and how the film sets “crackled with an underlying lust” back then, unlike the moments when everyone now just looks at their phone in bad moments. Some of the interviews are more successful than others: Soucy presents a moment in which Vanessa Redgrave fights him because she wants her interview to be as good as possible as a sign of how difficult working with her on The Bostonians must have been. But of course it can’t have been that difficult, because Merchant and Ivory hired her again eight years later for Howards End and even much later for The White Countess.
This is Soucy’s first feature-length documentary after a series of shorts, including a short documentary on the music in Merchant Ivory’s films, and what it lacks in craft it makes up for in love of its subject. There are interview responses from Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter, among others, emphasizing how much fun they had making these films, without going much deeper than the surface. Which brings us back to the fatal flaw of “Merchant Ivory.” The film shows how the duo helped spark the hype around period costume dramas that has continued ever since… but it doesn’t really explore why Merchant Ivory’s costume dramas are far superior to everyone else’s. There is a huge difference in quality between “A Room with a View” and “Downton Abbey.”
Most costume dramas today are escapes. Merchant Ivory’s films were interior journeys about characters with richly drawn inner lives – journeys often set in exquisite settings. A Room with a View is one of cinema’s finest elaborations of what it means not to know your own mind. Because Lucy Honeychurch is unable to know herself or her desires, she is unable to move the plot forward, resulting in a film full of moments and digressions rather than a suspense-filled narrative. The film completely contradicts the entire plot-industrial complex that has dominated the industry ever since, and would have been unthinkable without the film’s screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who more than anyone else brought a novelist’s sensibility to her scripts. (Soucy does a great job of incorporating Jhabvala’s contribution, as well as that of composer Richard Robbins – which is all the more difficult because they, like so many others involved in these films, including Merchant himself, are deceased.) Imagine if the main characters in Downton Abbey never found fulfillment, like Anthony Hopkins’ butler in The Remains of the Day? Simply because he doesn’t have the courage to “dare.” Imagine if the Abbey were closed down altogether because Lord Grantham became a Nazi supporter?
It is understandable that Soucy did not want to disparage other films. But such an implication could have been reached simply by looking a little more closely at what made Merchant Ivory’s own films so special. Music and life intermingled in her works. And to paraphrase Mr. Beebe again, it was very exciting for us.
Grade: C+
“Merchant Ivory” opens Friday, August 30, in New York City and Los Angeles.
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