In the Dark Reviews

This year's Academy Awards are coming up next month, but I've never been any good at predicting the winners, so I thought I'd look back at a film that was nominated for eight Academy Awards 30 years ago and didn't win one.

When "The Remains of the Day" premiered in 1993, my tastes ran more toward Miramax than Merchant Ivory, but a family friend recently suggested to my mother, the retired English teacher, that they give the film a second viewing. My mom had taught the 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, upon which the film was based.

In 1992, Anthony Hopkins won the Academy Award for best actor for his role as Dr. Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs," and in 1994, Hopkins was nominated for the Academy Award for best actor for his role as Mr. Stevens, the butler of the fictional Darlington Hall in postwar Britain, in "The Remains of the Day." What's most striking is not that Hopkins was able to play two such characters, but that he could play them in such different ways.

Hopkins' Lecter dominated every scene he appeared in, to the point that Hopkins himself scored his Oscar for best actor with only 16 minutes of screentime in "The Silence of the Lambs." However, playing the rigorously dignified Stevens, who tamped down any independent viewpoints or reactions he might have had, required Hopkins to do most of his work subtly and under the surface in "The Remains of the Day."

Hopkins plays the almost monastically understated Stevens, who lives to serve the less-than-deserving Lord Darlington (James Fox), a dilettante. His initially earnest good intentions are all too easily misled into bigotry, and even treason. It reminds me of the best (and still underappreciated) performances of the distinctive English character actor Donald Pleasence.

Whether he was playing the villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film "You Only Live Twice," or Dr. Samuel Loomis in the "Halloween" horror franchise, watching Pleasence work was like witnessing a neutron star implode.

Likewise, Stevens struggles to acknowledge and adjust to the shortfalls of Lord Darlington and his own father, Mr. Stevens Sr. (Peter Vaughan). Stevens Sr. falters in his duties as an under-butler due to old age and infirmity, and Hopkins speaks volumes about Stevens' rigid emotional state through the turmoil in his icy blue eyes.

Ishiguro wrote "The Remains of the Day" as a critical commentary on the regimented British class system, but as cinema has gained more awareness of, and empathy for, neurodivergent characters, I wonder whether Hopkins' Stevens would qualify as being "on the spectrum," especially given the succession of missed cues in his relationship with the headstrong housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson).

Lord Darlington's distinguished guests use Stevens' deliberate neutrality, in commenting upon political issues of the day, to argue that such matters should not be left up to the votes of "the common man," but as a socially disconnected little kid who experienced moments of bullying in school, I didn't need to grow up in the British class system to recognize the mocking grins of the cool kids, as their questions to you make you think, "This is a trap, but I don't know how."

Perhaps more tragic is that Stevens and Kenton's occasionally fractious dealings possess the potential to force each of them to evolve beyond their boundaries, but that never happens because Kenton keeps expecting Stevens to pick up on her unspoken signals. Stevens is incapable of doing so because he is every bit as "institutionalized" into domestic service as James Whitmore's Brooks Hatlen was "institutionalized" into lifetime incarceration in 1994's "The Shawshank Redemption."

As Neil Gaiman wrote in "The Wake" story arc that served as the culmination of "The Sandman" series for DC Comics, "Sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change."

Speaking of comic book connections, while one might expect a British film to depict its American characters as being crudely ignorant of the nuances of international diplomacy, another aspect of "The Remains of the Day" that stands out is its casting of Christopher Reeve as a U.S. politician who warns the Brits they're blind to the perils posed by the rise of Hitler.

When a film casts Superman to argue its point, that's making a bold statement in and of itself.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]