Delayed Reaction: A Room with a View

Premise: A woman trapped by proper English society has promised herself to one man despite falling for another.

 

The Merchant/Ivory pictures, I’ve learned, are a “you had to be there” kind of thing. The Marchant/Ivory brand was such a defined product that it took me years to realize that was the name of the producer and director, not just the name of the production studio. In my defense, it doesn’t help that “Merchant” and “Ivory” are both words with meanings that could even work together. How is that name different than Castle Rock Productions or Working Title Films? Anyway, Marchant Ivory is its own genre that today has come to mean the worst kind of stuffy Oscar bait. While they never snagged a Best Picture award, they sure came close. The film for this post actually lost to a film, Out of Africa, that I’d probably guess was Merchant Ivory.

 

I can’t say I’ve come away from the few Merchant Ivory films I’ve seen with a higher opinion than “stuffy Oscar bait”. A Room with a View is a fine film. The cast is incredible. It has a sly sense of humor that can get lost in the fancy costumes. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who does like the movie. I just found it a hair too stolid for the romance of it to work. It gets to a scene like when Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) and George (Julian Sands) first embrace and it felt perfunctory. I didn’t get any animal magnetism; just a need to complicate the story.

 

Without such a terrific cast, this film would be absolutely inert. I’m embarrassed to say that despite knowing Daniel Day-Lewis was in the film and even mentioned in the opening credits, it still took me too long to realize who he was in the film. I often find him overrated, but he sure can disappear into a role. It’s an odd era to see Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in. Of course, I know of them in their AARP eras and I’m comfortable seeing them as young women. Mid-1980s, when they were 50, is a bizarre in-between. They’re good, of course, but I kept mentally adding 15 years to them. It was weird seeing Helena Bonham Carter (in her film debut) so young. She must’ve been 18-19 when she filmed this and holds her own with all the adult characters so well. There are some actors who were never children no matter how young they look. Margot Robbie has the same thing. I tend to associate Carter so much with her Fight Club/Tim Burton era that I forget how much of an ingénue she was in her early years.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend