Pointing at Magnificence (With Clips!): "A Room with a View"

For a couple of days now, I've been trying to figure out how to approach the extraordinary Merchant/Ivory film A Room with a View, from 1985.

First, I tried to write about the maddening difficulties involved in the attempt to explain to someone what you think about a film. While this seems like a pretty straightforward endeavor, what it actually consists of is attempting to translate what you see on the screen into ideas, finding some way to put those ideas into words, and then managing to get those words in front of another person, who in turn has to figure out some way to first understand them and then integrate them into their own already-existing ideas.

What a pain in the ass! And trying to write about it in some meta-way is interesting, I suppose, and also related to the humorous problems with communication and self-knowledge that lie at the heart of A Room with a View, but I couldn't make that piece work at all.

After that first, rather tawdry failure, I wrote a long, convoluted explanation of the reasons that negative criticism is easy because it's explaining what something is not, while positive criticism is hard because it's explaining what something is. I'm still not even sure where that idea was really going, or if it even makes sense, and needless to say that attempt came off even more poorly than the first.

So now I find myself stranded in front of the film, as it were, discovering that about the only thing I can think to do is point at it and say, "See?! Don't you see how wonderful it is?!"

So that's what I’m going to do: point to some clips from the movie – you'll see the videos embedded at the bottom of each section – and exclaim about its wonders.

1. The Plot

A Room with a View has the advantage of being adapted from the book of the same name by a great writer, E. M. Forster. This is an advantage because novels are better at exploring interior emotional states than are movies, and so movies about subtle emotions that are based on books almost always have a leg up on similar movies that come from original screenplays. Even by these standards, though, the plot here is exceptional.

In its basics, the story goes like this. There is a young woman named Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) visiting Florence with her cousin Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith), who is serving as a chaperone. In a pensione there, they meet a cast of lovable characters, including a freethinking young man named George Emerson (Julian Sands) and his radically freethinking father Mr. Emerson (Denholm Elliott).

A collision occurs: Lucy is a creature of order and restrictive social norms, who also possesses a buried urge to live a full, emotionally exciting life. George represents this wildness – he climbs into a tree during a picnic to holler his creed: "Joy! Beauty! Love!" – but he is also just too socially outré to be accepted. It's obvious, however, that the two are in serious danger of falling in love, and so to prevent any scandal from developing Charlotte whisks Lucy back to England.

There, at her family's estate (delightfully called "Windy Corner") Lucy becomes engaged to one Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis), who is as pedantic as he is snobbish. But when both Charlotte and the Emersons appear on the scene again, things come to a head. Lucy must choose between love (George) and propriety (Cecil). She chooses love, of course, and the whole thing ends with Lucy and George honeymooning in Florence in the pensione where it all began.

What makes this plot so magnificent, I think, is the incredible delicacy and balance of its construction. It takes the predicaments of its main characters seriously, and, although we know it will end as it does – it's clear from the start that it's a love story – it does not, like the lower-grade romantic comedies that descend from these kinds of literary works, treat the impediments to Lucy and George's love as simplistic hurdles to be leapt over in order to keep the audience entertained for ninety minutes.

Instead, it presents the dilemmas here – How to balance the essential madness of love against the expectations of conformity that society throws at us? How to be truly yourself in a world that pushes you to be just about anything else? – as actual difficulties of living, things that we all struggle with. In large part, it does this by showing us that all of the characters struggle with them in one way or another. Which is to say that the tale of Lucy and George finds its expression not only in them but in every character of the story; it's unified in a way that few movie plots are, its spiritual and human ramifications extending through every element of what appears on screen.

If I had to choose one sequence from the film to represent this, I might go with the scene leading up to the first kiss between George and Lucy. In this moment, everyone has gone on a picnic in Italy. Charlotte and her new novelist friend Eleanor Lavish (Judi Dench) find that they don't want to gossip in front of Lucy, who decides to go and find the male half of the party. Charlotte then realizes that Lucy may encounter George, and hastens to stop them before some piece of impropriety happens. As you watch, note the way that the main elements of the film – submerged desire and propriety being fronted with the overcoming rush of sensuality and love – are enacted in virtually every frame: in the story Eleanor is telling Charlotte, in the setting itself, in the Italian carriage-driver Lucy gets to lead her up the hill, and in the final sequence. Here is the entire plot of the film, in miniature. (And also, don't forget to note how damned beautiful the whole thing is!)

2. The Acting

Now, I've never claimed to be any kind of a doctor, but if you were able to watch that clip above without being moved, I would politely suggest it might be time to seek medical attention. But where in movies does this emotional force come from? In large part, from the people who are playing the people we're watching.

It helps, if you want to have good acting in a film, to have good actors. And obviously, we're dealing with some luminaries here, between Day-Lewis, Carter, Smith, Elliott, Dench, Simon Callow, Rosemary Leach, and others. But having talent in front of the camera is not enough: Dench's presence can't somehow make the latter-day Bond films more than what they are, Carter's performance didn't do much to save Planet of the Apes, and Elliott's role in Trading Places, as perfect as it was, didn't lend that film a translucent sense of humanity embodied, or some other such fancy phrase.

But the acting in A Room with a View certainly does give the film a translucent sense of humanity embodied, as well as whatever other flowery encomiums you might want to come up with.

For examples of acting, people usually choose scene-chewing dialogue sequences, or moments in which actors find depths of profundity or agony. And there's nothing wrong with this – it's often profundity that seems striking to us in art because it's so infrequent a visitor in our own lives – but it doesn't really fit with the tenor of this film. Not that the film isn't profound, but it gets there through lightness instead of darkness.

So have a look at this scene, in which George, the Reverend Mr. Beebe (Callow), and Lucy's brother Freddy (Rupert Graves) go skinny-dipping. Notice, if you will, the unbridled joy of it, the spontaneity, the ability to capture an almost Wordsworthian or Whitmanesque relationship to the body and nature (as far removed from the culture of 1985 as it could possibly be), and the way the scene plays joyously with and against the reactions of the characters who come upon this bathing scene. This is acting as the embodiment of a sort of joy and freedom that is perfectly recognizable to us but lies outside the realm of (most of our) daily experiences; this is acting as providing a window into the profound sense of being delighted with life itself. (I am loathe to do this, but such is the state of our culture and my lack of knowledge of the people who might stumble across this celebration that I feel I ought to mention that there is brief male nudity in this sequence – so if that kind of stuff frightens you, consider yourself warned!)

3. The Writing and Dialogue

Great dialogue, as I've noted before, is a terribly difficult thing to write. And the dialogue in A Room with a View is fantastic (again, probably due to its basis in the work of a great writer, although I must confess that I haven't gone back and compared it to the novel, and it must be said that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who wrote the script, is no slouch).

As Justice Potter Stewart famously said about pornography, you know good dialogue when you hear it. In this, as in so many matters related to art, a good deal of the truth of things comes down to taste. If I had the time and energy, I would pull a clip from the TV show The Old Man to illustrate this point, as that show would be a terrific threat to run away with any "Worst Dialogue Of The Year" competition one might care to put on; in short, its main sin is that it somehow manages to combine self-indulgence with a dearth of insight into human nature, and then throws an absolute lack of aesthetic taste into the mix.

The dialogue in A Room with a View is the opposite. It is a reservoir of wit. It is continually both funny and insightful about human nature. And significantly, given the demands of the screenwriting form, it shows us again and again exactly who these people are and what they are going through with an extraordinary economy. Three-minute monologues, there are not; a wonderful revelation of human nature, there is.

The following scene is from the opening of the film. It shows Lucy and Charlotte sitting down to dinner and meeting a group of people who will all go on to be involved in the action; as you'll see, our heroines are initially distressed because they have been given rooms without a view. Note how quickly we understand who each of these people are, and the loving, humorous way they are each introduced (the reaction shots play a large part here as well, as does Humphrey Dixon's editing, which is wonderful throughout). Notice, as well, the delightful way that the lines flow from one to the next and at the same time build a complete vision of a fully realized social moment. This, folks, is a finely written scene.

4. The Direction

The film is fantastically directed. It accomplishes with brio everything it sets out to do, which is all you can really ask for from a work of art. If you've watched the above clips and are alert to such things, you'll notice how straightforward and yet delicate the camera work is, the way the blocking is expertly arranged for both humor and emotional observation, and how gorgeous it all looks (thanks in large part to the cinematography of Tony Pierce-Roberts). Again and again, it makes the right choices.

But rather than dwell on that, I'd like to make another point: this film was made for $3 million dollars (in 1985 money). How cheap is that? Considering that in the same year, Richard Donner's The Goonies cost $19 million to make, Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple cost $15 million, as did Jonathan Lynn's Clue, and Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire cost $10 million, it's really, really cheap. And A Room with a View was shot on location in England and Italy! (So the next time you see a contemporary film, shot on a set and filled with CGI, that looks as absolutely terrible as so many of them do, my suggestion is that you tear up your seat and throw it through the screen in protest – as viewers are reputed to have done at early showings of The Rules of the Game – screaming "If you can't do it half as well as A Room with a View with twenty times the money, then you have no business in this business!" Will it get anyone's attention at the studio? No. But it will make you feel better, I promise.)

Director James Ivory knew what he was about, in other words. And one of the many small things he does splendidly well is save money by the fantastic use of one-shots; which are these moments when there is only one person on the screen. These are far easier to shoot than sequences with multiple actors, and far quicker, which means they are a great way of saving money. There are many of them throughout the film, but I'll leave you with only one, featuring the magnificent Daniel Day-Lewis.

The following snippet is composed of three shots, all of them economical. The first, using a stable camera, shows the women getting into the camera; the third shows Carter's reaction shot to Day-Lewis's line. But it's the second, the one-shot of Lewis, that I particularly love. Notice how much mileage we get out of this quick snippet, how it is the absolute center of the dramatic action of the sequence – and then remember that this could have been shot any time they were at that location and had Lewis on set, which is to say fast and cheap – and you'll have some idea of how accomplished a director Ivory is.

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