Outlaw Marriages (28 page)

Set in the period immediately after the Civil War,
The Bostonians
focuses on American social reform efforts. The plot revolves around an unmarried
suffragist who adopts a naive young inspirational speaker as her companion. Competing against the suffragist for the younger woman is a chauvinistic lawyer who's strikingly handsome.
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What set
The Bostonians
apart from other independent films was that the suffragist was played by Academy Award winner Vanessa Redgrave. For one of the nation's most honored actresses to star in a film that was the work of a production company outside the Hollywood studio system—and made for a modest $3 million—caused the motion picture world to stand up and take notice of Merchant Ivory Productions.
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An additional boost in stature for the company came when the film not only garnered positive reviews from the critics, with the
Los Angeles Times
describing it as “sumptuous” and the
Washington Post
saying, “It is a great movie,” but also did relatively well at the box office.
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In 1973, the film magazine
Sight and Sound
had described James Ivory and Ismail Merchant as “two resilient, international optimists who continue to plan and organize in the belief that the best is yet to come. Ivory suggests, half jokingly, that Merchant is bound some day to have a really big financial success.”
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A dozen years later, that success became reality when the same-sex couple adapted British novelist E. M. Forster's witty and engaging look at Edwardian manners into a huge hit.

A Room with a View
revolves around an upper-class young woman named Lucy who travels to Italy under the watchful eye of her older cousin. When the women's room in their Florence pensione lacks good views of the city, they accept an offer from a man and his handsome and free-spirited son, a railway clerk named George, to switch rooms. A few days later on a trip into the Tuscan countryside, George kisses Lucy passionately, alarming the straitlaced cousin so severely that she cuts the holiday short. Back in England, Lucy agrees to marry a priggish but wealthy suitor. When George reappears, though, Lucy's heart joyfully triumphs over convention as she's drawn to his robust vitality. So she breaks her engagement and marries George.
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Ivory executed every element of the film with the utmost care. Among the memorable scenes is an early one in which Lucy plays a Beethoven piece on the piano, the nuanced movements of her body and the passion of her music subtly suggesting the romantic emotion in her nature that, later in the film, will be kindled into rebellion.
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A Room with a View
's cast was one of its strengths. Academy Award winner Maggie Smith plays the archetype spinster—prim, anxious, and well-meaning—with hollow eyes that betray the human price she's paid for being
inoffensive. Helena Bonham Carter's Lucy is girlishly appealing but also a young woman who possesses the courage to change her mind and refuse to marry a man she doesn't love. Julian Sands brings to his role as George an emotional fullness that communicates a healthy and irresistible manliness. Daniel Day-Lewis, who would go on to win two Academy Awards later in his career, plays the fiancé not merely as a foppish buffoon but also as a man with a vulnerability hidden beneath his starched collar.
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Critics who reviewed the film were unstinting in their praise. The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
labeled it “superb,” and the
Atlanta Constitution
called it “a scintillating and cherishable masterpiece.” The
Washington Post
weighed in with the statement, “It is a lovely film,” and the
Chicago Sun-Times
said, “The story moved slowly, it seemed, for the same reason you try to make ice cream last: because it's so good.”
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When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for 1986,
A Room with a View
appeared on the list a stunning eight times, including nods to Ivory for best director and Merchant for best picture. By the end of the glamorous ceremony, the much-praised independent film had beaten out its competition from the major Hollywood studios in three categories, receiving golden statuettes for best costume design, best art direction, and best screenplay adaptation.
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The real game changer for Ivory and Merchant, however, came at the box office. For the men finally proved that they could create a cinematic work that pulled throngs of moviegoers into the neighborhood multiplex. They'd spent $3 million to create a film that produced gross revenues of $70 million.
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For the first quarter century of Ivory and Merchant's life together, only their closest friends and family members knew about their love for each other. They kept their outlaw marriage out of the public eye because they needed to raise money to make their films. That is, they feared that financial backing would be tough to come by if potential investors knew the two men weren't merely professional partners but also romantic ones.
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Those concerns faded dramatically after the financial success of
A Room with a View
. Merchant, in his role as producer, no longer had to worry about persuading people to invest in the films his partner directed, as the projects were now seen as surefire moneymakers. And so, the couple no longer felt a need to keep their personal relationship a secret.
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They went public with that aspect of their lives in a 1986
New York Times
feature story. The headline read “Merchant and Ivory's Country Retreat,” and the accompanying photo showed the two men posing between the Ionic columns on the front of a large house. The story identified the structure as the
1805 Hudson Valley country house where they'd been living together for the previous decade—their primary residence before that had been an apartment in Manhattan.
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Details in the story gave readers a sense of the dynamics of the couple's domestic partnership: Merchant did the cooking, Ivory did the decorating.

Among the producer's culinary triumphs were saffron and almond ice cream, according to the piece, which also quoted him as listing the ingredients in the Bloody Marys he served the reporter who came to the couple's home to interview them—the visitor gave the drink his seal of approval, pronouncing it “potent and throaty.”
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As for Ivory's decorating, the
Times
characterized the director's style as “eclectic.” The story reported that the central hallway in the house, which had twelve-foot ceilings, felt like “an informal museum” filled with objects the couple had collected while filming in locations around the world. The story pointed out that Ivory sometimes paired unlikely items with each other—such as placing an antique Chippendale settee near a stuffed deer head with massive antlers.
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The
Times
wasn't the only paper that helped the couple go public with their relationship, as stories about it soon appeared in the
Chicago Tribune
and
Washington Post
as well. In the
Tribune
piece, Merchant talked about the night twenty-five years earlier when he and Ivory met. “I asked him out for coffee after the screening,” the producer recalled. “I think he was a bit taken aback by this brash young man, but he agreed.” The reporter who did the
Post
piece tried her best to expose cracks in the couple's relationship, but her efforts failed, forcing her to write, “They won't divulge any big differences between them.”
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A Room with a View
's success caused the major Hollywood studios, for the first time, to regard Ivory and Merchant as highly desirable filmmakers. In the eyes of the movers and shakers of the movie capital of the world, the couple had made a low-budget movie that had earned a great deal of money, and that meant the twosome was suddenly in great demand.

Ivory told a reporter, in 1986, that “truckloads of scripts” were arriving at his and Merchant's home. In other words, studio executives were trying to persuade the couple to take on projects they saw as likely moneymakers. “The projects have big budgets, and very often a star has said they want to do it. But it's not anything I'd want to make,” Ivory said. “It's just rubbish.”
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And so, despite receiving offers that most filmmakers would have jumped at the chance to make, the couple rejected them all. “The scripts were shallow,” Merchant said. “None of them had any link to our methods of filmmaking.
This was not how we saw ourselves.”
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To show Hollywood exactly who they were as filmmakers, Ivory and Merchant chose as their next project a movie that they knew from the outset had no chance of drawing a huge audience or making a lot of money. Their choice did, however, reflect the men's new openness about their sexuality.

Maurice
was adapted from E. M. Forster's novel about a young Englishman, during the Edwardian period, who gradually recognizes his homosexuality. He then must decide how to live his life—will he embrace his true nature and bear a stigma or will he suppress his feelings and move forward on a path toward conventional success?
Maurice
made a modest profit while earning positive reviews, such as the
New York Times
calling the film “deft” and “intelligent.”
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By the early 1990s, Ivory and Merchant had established such a sterling reputation that the most acclaimed actors in the world were eager to be associated with them, even if it meant earning a mere fraction of what the major Hollywood studios paid. Anthony Hopkins took that step in 1992 when, after winning an Academy Award a year earlier, he starred in the film that many critics would come to see as the greatest work Merchant Ivory Productions ever created.
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Howards End
, which was adapted from E. M. Forster's novel of the same name, is set just before World War I and focuses on three families within the British class system. The Wilcoxes—Hopkins's character, Henry, is the family patriarch—earned their fortune through business ventures. The Schlegels inherited their wealth and are progressive thinkers committed to the arts and social reform. The Basts are struggling at a grim, much lower rung of society, fighting desperately to avoid being swallowed up by poverty.
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The central character is the older of the two Schlegel sisters, Margaret, and is played by Emma Thompson. Henry Wilcox's wife dies early in the film, and he then becomes attracted to Margaret, a somewhat flighty yet wonderfully compassionate soul—much like his deceased wife. When Margaret accepts Henry's marriage proposal, his greedy children and her headstrong sister are all dismayed. Meanwhile, the sister has befriended Leonard Bast, a down-on-his-luck clerk who aspires to a better life. The sister's relentless effort to help Leonard leads to a shocking moment of tragedy that takes one life and seriously damages several others.

Again, this film is distinguished by its attention to period detail. The Wilcox mansion in London is the epitome of Edwardian opulence, the dark rooms made claustrophobic by the ubiquitous potted plants, porcelain figurines,
and lace antimacassars. The Schlegel home feels more open because sunlight streams through the windows and paintings of landscapes dot the walls, which are painted a tasteful pale gray. The Bast apartment is dark and cramped, so small that there's barely room to move. Most striking of all is the Wilcox family's pastoral retreat, named Howards End, with its abundance of windows looking onto the colorful English garden—bursting with bright pink and yellow blossoms.
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Reviewers were exuberant about the film. The
Boston Globe
called it a “beautifully nuanced, richly textured masterpiece,” and the
San Francisco Chronicle
said, “It's not only a feast for the eyes, but it's also a wise and thoughtful film.” The
New York Times
pronounced the movie “a great pleasure” and also said, “It's time for legislation decreeing that no one be allowed to make a screen adaptation of a novel of any quality if James Ivory and Ismail Merchant are available and elect to do the job.”
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The movie was nominated for nine Academy Awards, with Ivory making the list for director and Merchant for best picture.
Howards End
ultimately received the Oscars for best art direction, best screenplay adaptation, and best actress in a leading role—for Emma Thompson's tour de force performance as Margaret Schlegel.
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In 1993, Ivory and Merchant made what critics would come to see as the last of their great films. Many observers also saw the work as a triumph because it again starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, but this time the filmmakers turned things upside down by casting the stars not as a wealthy couple but as a pair of servants.
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The Remains of the Day
tells the story of a quintessential English butler, played by Hopkins, who uses the demands of his job to insulate himself from emotional risk. The other major character is a housekeeper, played by Thompson, who's generally sensible but sometimes irrepressibly passionate. She does her best to break through the armor that the butler has created to hide his feelings, but he remains stalwartly distant. The adaptation of a novel by writer Kazuo Ishiguro begins in the late 1930s and continues for twenty years, set in a majestic manor house appointed with leather-bound books and gleaming silver flatware.
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