Merchant Ivory, directed by Stephen Soucy, is in cinemas now.
It’s 20 years since the death of Ismail Merchant, the Indian film producer who went to America and found success as the maker of films about uptight Edwardian Brits. His death marked the end of a 44-year business and life partnership with James Ivory, the California-born director whose career started out with Indophile leanings before heading decidedly Anglophile.
In those decades, the company delivered nearly a film a year, becoming the byword for period dramas in the 1980s with the likes of Heat and Dust, The Bostonians and A Room with a View. The last of those was the first of three EM Forster adaptations, with Maurice and Howards End following. That trilogy, and arguably their best film, 1993’s The Remains of the Day, may be considered the quintessential Merchant Ivory films.
They might have been dismissed as “the Laura Ashley school of film-making”, but Maurice was a landmark in bringing gay cinema to the mainstream and the rest helped open the stately house doors to the likes of Downton Abbey.
That those four were Merchant Ivory at its best is reinforced by this lively, affectionate, slightly scattergun and overstuffed documentary. It might inspire anyone already acquainted with the Merchant Ivory oeuvre to revisit one of the above titles. But you might also wish that this lumpy doco had more of the elegance of its subjects.
Despite his long absence, the gregarious Merchant remains a big presence, not just from archive footage but in anecdotes about how he was happy to start production on films without having the finances in place, then equally happy to infuriate cast and crew wanting their wages. The doco serves as an interesting corrective: Merchant Ivory period dramas featured many well-off people in elegant costume, but those in the bonnets and those making them often had battles over getting paid out of minuscule budgets. Anthony Hopkins made four films – two great, two terrible – with them and sued the company for unpaid fees on the fourth. Hopkins gets a sound bite, but predictably he isn’t among the film’s talking heads.
Helena Bonham Carter, a posh girl whose career playing posh girls effectively began with A Room With a View and Howards End, describes the MI milieu with daughterly affection. Her Howards End co-star Emma Thompson is forthright and funny throughout. And when she describes a scene opposite Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, you wish there were more moments like it. A perfectly pleasant chat with Vanessa Redgrave becomes a tetchy exchange, which is par for the course for the actress. But it does the film, which runs for nearly two hours, no favours.
Director Soucy, a Broadway veteran here directing his first feature, is clearly a very big fan but not much of an interviewer. His infrequent voiceover narration feels more like an editing patch-up than a storytelling one. And you might wish he’d made some bolder choices about what made the cut. A wander down the clothes racks from past Merchant Ivory productions with the original designers is over too soon. A visit to a converted barn at Ivory’s place to see the old gear used to cut the films can’t end fast enough.
Still, it’s a nice portrait of the quietly spoken Ivory, now 97, in the wake of his 2018 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar win – his first from four nominations – for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, a gay love story that was tamer than Maurice had been 30 years earlier. And it’s a solid reminder of the other departed talents in Merchant Ivory productions – novelist-turned-screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and composer Richard Robbins, who also had a romantic relationship with Merchant.
Bonham Carter suggests a drama about them would open with a dolly shot of the quartet each beavering away in their own corners of the production office and end with Merchant shouting at someone. Hopefully Wes Anderson gets the memo.
Rating out of five: ★★★
