The Bostonians

James Ivory directs Madeleine Potter and Vanessa Redgrave

I've been trying to come to terms with James Ivory as we both near the slow, lurching dance to the grave. I found his work, as I watched it in my youth, overly refined and visually dull. Merchant Ivory was too Apollonian for me while I was enjoying the Dionysian frenzy of Evil Dead, Mad Max, and Possession. The Bostonians, released in 1984, is a Henry James adaptation that is respectful and suitably repressed. I won't conjecture on Ivory's childhood in Oregon, but his hometown of Klamath Falls was and is the very definition of the sticks. Ivory's deliberate and visually chaste style jibes better with straitlaced period dramas than more modern and unbuttoned fare: I would cite Jane Austen in Manhattan, Slaves of New York, and Le Divorce, all failures, as evidence. In the Twentieth Century, I thought the Merchant Ivory team's tradition of quality approach was retrograde cinema. It is telling that The Bostonians was partly financed by both the BBC and Boston's WGBH. However, I find the Merchant Ivory films, even their failures, more interesting than I did at the time and The Bostonians is a relative success.

For those who have not waded through the thicket of this book's prose or would prefer not to, The Bostonians is a love triangle set in New England and New York in the mid-1870s. Young Verena Tarrant (Madeleine Potter) enters a domestic relationship with the older Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave) united by love and a commitment to feminism. Verena, the daughter of a mesmeric healer, is a powerful speaker and a boon to the nascent suffragette movement. She attracts male attention, some of which has been wisely elided by screenwriter and Merchant Ivory mainstay Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The third point in the triangle is Basil Ransome, a Southern born lawyer based in New York and distant cousin of Olive's. The names of the characters exemplify their essence as in Dickens whose The Pickwick Papers makes a cameo appearance. A virile war veteran vies with a New England spinster for the soul of America. Male is contrasted with female, reaction with progression. Self-interest with idealism and private life with a public one. I could go on and on as, doubtless, others have in countless academic tomes. The denouement is inevitable as love conquers all and biology proves to be destiny.

The film ameliorates the sting of James' satire of New England, with its quirky devotion to progressive causes, homeopathy, and spiritualism. The film manages to portray a simulacrum of centennial Americana with patriotic songs, fireworks, and lovely seaside vistas that recall Winslow Homer. The cinematography by Walter Lassally was justly praised, but the ramshackle nature of Merchant Ivory productions, Christopher Reeve's agent described them as "wandering minstrels", has its drawbacks. The lighting is spotty and a few outdoor shots cry out for a crane, but such was the threadbare reality for these intrepid independents. Richard Robbins, the most under sung member of the Merchant Ivory menage, offers an effective score that ranges from original music to Wagner to Edgar Poe. 

Madeleine Potter and Christopher Reeve

The best asset of the film is its superb supporting players, all well cast and spot on: Linda Hunt, Nancy Marchand, Wallace Shawn, Wesley Addy, Nancy New, and Jessica Tandy who alone could away with intoning James' batty bromides. Madeleine Potter captures the youthful pluck of Verena, but not the charisma that charms multitudes. Christopher Reeve is always a little wooden, but so is his character who is enamored with his own false sense of rectitude. Reeve was a big, hulking, athletic guy. Physically he is perfect, a fox in the henhouse, but his Southern demeanor and accent are not convincing. Scenes that should have an emotional impact, such as Basil visiting Harvard's memorial to the Civil War dead, don't register. It grieves me to criticize Reeve because he appears to have been an utter gentleman. On the other hand, there is Vanessa Redgrave who jousted with Ivory during filming. In a recent documentary, Stephen Soucy's very good Merchant Ivory, Ms. Redgrave shows she hasn't mellowed by ripping into her interviewer and I would not mess with her whether she was holding an AK-47 or not. Nevertheless, she was one of the most brilliant actresses of her generation and she displays her mastery here. Her lustrous hair pinned back tight, Redgrave looks and behaves, as Olive describes herself, "awkward and dry." Pauline Kael wrote that Redgrave's performance was the only thing she liked about the film.

I have a more positive appreciation of the film, but do acknowledge its moments of drawing room torpor. However, that dovetails with the work's examinations of the strictures of a privileged American life. Ivory and his associates takes pains to show how sweltering life was in American cities in the 19th century. The ladies are swaddled in a ridiculous number of layers that they are eager to discard as soon as they are in private quarters. The strictures of society are literally impinged on female bodies. Ivory's chaste style remains more suited to the corsets of repression than the loosed bonds of Romantic extasy.