Saturday, March 21, 2009

The Remains of the Day

I finished reading The Remains of the Day for the first time about a week ago after picking up a copy at a friend's book swap party and really enjoyed it. Unreliable first person narration, crisis of masculinity AND nationality AND class AND professional purpose AND age AND political affiliation--it's great. Because I am Bridget Jones, I decided to watch the Merchant Ivory film version on DVD Friday night at home with a glass of red wine, and, holy crap, you guys, it's sooo bad! And not because it's lacking in "action," arranging matches style, but because there's actually rather too much action. For as long as it is (about two hours and ten minutes), the pace feels ridiculously frenzied (is it the editing? I couldn't tell), the nondiegetic music is overly fussy and bullying, and most of the acting is totally lacking in anything resembling emotional intimacy. (Oddly enough, Christopher Reeve, the bloody American, is one of the few bright spots in the whole mess of stiff-upper-lippiness.) I don't know if it just hasn't aged well or if it was this bad in '93, but woof. I love a good English drawing room drama full of pregnant pauses and unspoken emotions, but nothing in the preceding clause at all relates to this movie.

4 comments:

Michael O'D said...

I'm a big fan of the novel "The Remains of the Day" too, so much so that I seem to keep reading Kazuo Ishiguro's other novels even though they're not very good. "When We Were Orphans" is really boring; "Never Let Me Go" is just dumb; and "The Unconsoled," which I recently read about 100 pages of and then put down, is bizarre and fantastical (not my type of stuff). I think I've pinpointed the problem. That stilted, repressed, I'll-declare-everything-including-the-obvious-in-precise-declarative-sentences voice that works so well for the butler in Remains of the Day isn't, as I had initially thought, a really clever literary contrivance. Instead, it's just the way Ishiguro writes, always. Reading that exact same voice in other contexts is therefore not only strange, but disappointing too.

Ah so, old chap.

Michael O'D said...

Also, you're right that C-Reeve is the highlight of the movie. I've always wanted to tell a banquet table of English nobles that they're nothing but amateurs.

Brendan McNamara said...

The Unconsoled is one of my favorite novels. It is the unreliable narrator tour de force. It is nowhere near as easy to read (or as short) as Remains of the Day, however. But I recommend it highly, fwiw.

Brendan McNamara said...

I am probaby also partial to The Unconsoled because the main character is a touring piano soloist and the book does a fine job mocking the highbrow avant-garde European modern "classical music" scene.