Word: butlers
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...least of these difficulties is the fact that the novel is narrated in the first person. At the beginning of both film and novel, Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), a butler at Darlington Hall, is about to begin a road trip about England. This physical journey is from the start linked to a spiritual quest. The narrator of the book, Mr. Stevens, does not intend to wander aimlessly about the country; rather, he embarks on a pilgrimage, resolved to restore Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, to her erstwhile position. He hardly even concerns himself with...
...novel, the first-person narrative unifies present and past and a multiplicity of minor incidents associated only through the consciousness of the butler. In the film, the narrator ha been removed, and only tenuous narrative coherence remains; the attempts made to integrate the various episodes into the film are sometimes rather artificial. On occasion, when a scene from the past is introduced, an image appears in the center of the screen, and gradually assumes the foreground, almost emerging from behind the prior picture; at other times, a voice-over of a letter written either from Mr. Stevens to Miss Kenton...
...Nazis; and the late '50s, when ! Stevens seeks out Miss Kenton in hopes she will return as housekeeper and, perhaps, something more. In his own ornate, unknowing words, Stevens condemns himself as the English version of a "good German": a man who disappointed Miss Kenton, his father (an aged butler), his country and himself in blinkered devotion to duty...
This time Ivory and his longtime colleagues have gone their source one better, or one quieter: the film is even more discreet, more Stevens-like, than the book. They have withheld the revelations of tears and admission of heartbreak that finally clatter around the butler like broken Wedgwood. Here, Stevens will never wake violently from his reverie of duty served; he will be trapped in Darlington Hall like a bird that can't find an open window. So the filmmakers have dared believe that the audience will detect these domestic cataclysms in the performance of the man who plays Stevens...
...friend the English actor Julian Fellowes had passed along this comment about a good butler: When he's in the room, the room is emptier. "I took that," Hopkins says, "and kept it in my head for the entire film. It was simple: just stand still." So much of the comedy in his role, and the sadness, arise from this stillness. Before a hunt, Stevens holds a drinking cup for a horseman; the aristocrat takes no notice of his offer, and the butler takes no notice of the slight. His stillness may mask sexual fear: when Miss Kenton amiably approaches...