Movie Reviews : Acting Makes ‘Day’ Glisten

“The Remains of the Day” is, to echo the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers lyric, a fine romance with no kisses. Fine for the audience, that is, but not for the participants, for this is a beautifully melancholy romance between people who point-blank refuse to acknowledge emotional attachments and, constricted by an unwritten professional code, can’t even bring themselves to address each other by first names.

While the thought of all this decorous self-denial between a butler and a housekeeper in one of England’s great houses in the days just before World War II may sound uninvolving, “Remains” (citywide) is the opposite, a moving and carefully modulated picture that overcomes a certain innate stodginess with acting from Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson that is little short of miraculous.

That Hopkins and Thompson are exceptional together is no surprise after the multiple Oscar-winning version of E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” shaped by the same team (director James Ivory, co-producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala) that here adapted Kazuo Ishiguro’s graceful Booker Award-winning novel.

Though this film does not have the thematic richness and grasp of last year’s model (due in part to a stubborn difficulty with transferring Ishiguro’s novel to the screen), the interplay between these two actors is if anything stronger here. And though it would be an oversimplification to drag out the conventional wisdom about the Astaire-Rogers partnership (which claimed that she gave him romantic appeal and he gave her class), Hopkins and Thompson do complement each other in ways that are exceptional.

An actor of thorough discipline and control, Hopkins’ gravity makes him the ideal foil for the lively Thompson, bringing out the clarity in her work, while her warmth can’t help but underline the innate humanity in his. Their scenes together are the heart of this film, done with an exquisitely calibrated emotion.

*

But “Remains” does not only take place in the servants’ quarters; it is an upstairs-downstairs film that cuts back and forth between the 1930s and 1958. It also parallels the events among the help with what is going on in the public parts of Darlington Hall and the life of Lord Darlington (James Fox).

“Remains” starts near the end of the story, in 1958, after Lord Darlington has died and Darlington Hall has been saved from desecration by the intervention of an American millionaire named Lewis (Christopher Reeve) who remembered both the house and Stevens, its butler, from earlier days.

For though he now presides over a puny few, Stevens (Hopkins) was once the stern head of a staff of 17. Upset at the current state of things downstairs, Stevens tells Lewis he has hopes of rehiring the now-married Miss Kenton (Thompson), the former housekeeper. Stevens then commences a cross-Britain trip to see Miss Kenton and perhaps set things right in more ways than one.

With intermittent returns to 1958, “Remains” now focuses on the 1930s, when Lord Darlington, a model of distant noblesse oblige, was a figure of some importance on the international political scene and Stevens was in his prime as a man who believed that perfect service for his lordship was a fine and noble ideal.

The Merchant-Ivory production team is the best in the business at re-creating England past, and “Remains” is surely and elegantly mounted.

A match for his surroundings is the equally unerring Stevens. His face a complete mask in which repressed emotions show only as rogue tics and twitches, Hopkins uses a combination of sympathy and distance to brilliantly turn a man of few outward feelings into a compelling figure.

No one makes Stevens twitch more than Miss Kenton, the new housekeeper. She is his match in punctiliousness, but her creed is duty with a human face, something Stevens finds puzzling. While all this is going on downstairs, major international conferences are taking place upstairs, with delegates like Lewis debating a particular passion of Lord Darlington’s, how best to re-integrate Germany into a hostile Europe.

Maybe inevitably, this part of “Remains” (rated PG for themes) is less involving than its downstairs half. This is especially unfortunate because feeling how much pride Stevens takes in knowing that “history could well be made under this roof,” and the price he paid for it, is critical to understanding his actions, or lack of them.

Both he and Miss Kenton, but especially he, implicitly assume that their employer knows best and unquestioningly opt to live half lives instead of whole ones to further Lord Darlington’s aims. When circumstances force Stevens and Miss Kenton to gradually confront exactly what they’ve sacrificed so much for, they must confront their own frailty as well.

Perhaps the greatest drag on the film’s overall effectiveness is a change from the book that may have been unavoidable. The novel is told from the point of view of Stevens, a man who is a fallible and untrustworthy narrator, and author Ishiguro’s strength is the way he allows us to see the true state of affairs even though our guide never really does. This subversive point of view is difficult to achieve on film, but without it the sorrowful story of “The Remains of the Day” can’t help but lose part of its poignancy. The presence of this year’s most moving tandem performance, however, makes it a film no one who is passionate about acting will be able to miss.

‘The Remains of the Day’

Anthony Hopkins: Stevens

Emma Thompson: Miss Kenton

James Fox: Lord Darlington

Christopher Reeves: Mr. Lewis

Peter Vaughan: Father

A Mike Nichols/John Calley/Merchant Ivory production, released by Columbia Pictures. Director James Ivory. Producers Mike Nichols, John Calley, Ismail Merchant. Executive producer Paul Bradley. Screenplay Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts. Editor Andrew Marcus. Costumes Jeanny Beavan, John Bright. Music Richard Robbins. Production design Luciana Arrighi. Art director John Ralph. Set decorator Ian Whittaker. Running time: 2 hours, 14 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG (themes).