Word: forsters
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LIKE LAST year's Room With A View, Maurice was adapted from an E.M. Forster novel by the Ivory-Merchant production team. It too focuses on the upper slice of English society and is filled with rabbit hunts, horse riding and quaint dinner conversation. The new film even features a climactic game of cricket...
...Ivory-Merchant team have always made the effort to be faithful to the spirit of the novels they have adapted, and with films like Room and The Bostonians, the approach worked well. With Maurice, however, a novel that Forster wrote in 1917 but refused to publish in his lifetime, the filmmakers have latched on to some lesser material, held tight for two and a half hours, and smothered stirring emotional turmoil with good intentions...
Merchant and Ivory may have maintained their loyalty to Forster and his text, but the story itself doesn't deserve the royal treatment...
...that matter, English sexuality -- have done without gamy gamekeepers, lurking unrepressed in the gorse, ready to help the privileged class assert its true randy nature? What the ineffable Mellors did for Lady Chatterley, Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves) does for Maurice Hall (James Wilby) in this adaptation of E.M. Forster's fantasy about physically fulfilling the love that once upon a time dared not speak its name...
...personal best in A Room with a View, he reverts to form here. That means too reverential a regard for his literary sources (which in this minor case is unnecessary) and no respect at all for screen dynamics. He remains trapped in the same guilty spirit in which Forster wrote...