Maurice (1987)

image courtesy of www.willowandthatch.com

As a James Ivory film, I went in predisposed to like this. Howard’s End, A Room with a View, and especially The Remains of the Day form an incredible triad of English period drama, powered by sharp characters and formidable performances. Maurice arrives right after A Room with a View, another E. M. Forster adaptation steeped in English manners and stifled passion. And society… OH, SOCIETY.

At Cambridge, Maurice (James Wilby) falls for fellow student Clive Durham (Hugh Grant), and the two begin an intimate but chaste relationship - this after Maurice received a memorably awkward birds-and-the-bees talk on the beach as a boy, complete with diagrams drawn in the sand. Clive eventually renounces his feelings for the safety of convention, marrying a woman and entering politics, and leaves Maurice devastated. Maurice later falls for Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves), the gamekeeper on Clive’s estate, and the two begin a passionate affair that cuts across class lines. Maurice is left to choose between respectability and authenticity, ultimately surrendering his social standing to be with Alec. Rupert Graves also has a bit of a Harry Styles look to him, which can’t have made the choice any harder.

What’s fascinating about the plot is that Maurice starts out the hesitant one, only to fall so hard that Clive can’t handle it and falls ill from the strain. When Clive finally cuts things off, Maurice unravels - there’s a great sullen-stare-into-the-fireplace moment that plays like an early draft of Timothy Chalamet’s finale in Ivory’s later screenplay for Call Me by Your Name. But it’s that unfulfilled romance, paradoxically, that opens Maurice up into an honest person, pushing back against the rigid norms of pre-WWI England. He has to go through it first, including a strange, unsettling encounter with an old stranger on a train.

I couldn’t place exactly what accent Ben Kingsley is doing as Lasker-Jones, the hypnotist Maurice turns to for something like an early version of conversion therapy - some flavor of American, evidently. It’s a small but pivotal role, and what makes it interesting is that Lasker-Jones clearly doesn’t believe Maurice is doing anything wrong; his actual advice is to simply move somewhere homosexuality isn’t illegal. Meanwhile, you can feel Scudder being pulled into the story without much warning. His courtship with Maurice has more staying power than the one with Clive, if only because Scudder has no ambitions toward “higher” status to protect - both men flirt with the idea of using the relationship against each other, but Scudder’s social position was never seriously at stake in giving into “temptation,” as they say.

It’s an admirable portrait of being an outcast in a society stacked against you in nearly every direction, and of how individuality, in this era, counted for far less than conformity. It doesn’t reach the heights of The Remains of the Dayor Howard’s End. And while it clearly seeds Ivory’s later, Oscar-winning screenplay (both being literary adaptations), Maurice feels less interested in the heat of young love than in the cost of acting on it. It’s a handsome film that drags in stretches - but a successful adaptation

3.5 out of 5 Stars