A Life of Service, To An Empty Ideal: A Review of “The Remains of the Day”

I love the writing of British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Of the several novels I have read, The Remains of the Day, the story of a blindly devoted English butler whose misguided loyalty to his profession and to his master have led to a wasted life, is my favourite. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1989.

When the Merchant-Ivory film was released in 1993, I was anxious to see what this esteemed pair had made of Ishiguro’s story. I was not disappointed. I have recently purchased the DVD and watched the film again, only to discover that the sublime enjoyment it offered me twenty years ago has only increased. The movie is not entirely faithful in reproducing the details of the novel; however, the atmosphere—one of both tragic and absurdly comic waste and loss in the midst of aristocratic gentility—brilliantly and lovingly depicted in the novel, is beautifully preserved by screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and director James Ivory.

Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) is butler to Lord Darlington in the years between the end of World War I and Darlington’s death, in national disgrace, after World War II. The epitome of the gentleman’s gentleman, Stevens is blindly committed to the loyal service of his master and to the meticulous preservation of every protocol incumbent to that service and to the tradition of a great household such as Darlington Hall. There is no room in Stevens’ world for displays of emotion, no matter what form they may take, as such displays would interfere with the proper running of the household and detract from the high level of professionalism on which Stevens has so greatly prided himself.

Of the novel, author Ishiguro says, “I intended the story to be one that could take off quite easily into the metaphorical sphere so that people could actually apply it to their own lives, wherever they lived, whenever they lived. I wanted it to be a universal human story. If I was writing a how-to book on how to waste your life, the English butler idea encapsulated two very decent ways in which you could waste your life: one was emotionally and the other was politically.”

As the most trusted member of the household, Stevens is privy to Lord Darlington’s dubious dealings with Nazism prior the Second World War, dealings that cause him to be branded a traitor during and after the war. Despite his clear knowledge that his master is either cynically using his influence to support the Nazi cause or being duped by Hitler and his minions, Stevens persists in his protestations that Darlington is a wise and well intentioned man and that it is the place of neither the butler nor any other servant to criticize or confront Darlington. Such an attitude is later to cause Stevens both serious regret and great embarrassment.

The housekeeper at Darlington Hall is Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), a highly competent, if rather young, woman who freely expresses both her opinions and her emotions, often to the consternation of Stevens. Through the course of the film it becomes quite clear that behind his great façade of professionalism Stevens harbours feelings for Miss Kenton, feelings which he is incapable, through long habit of repression, of either acknowledging or expressing. Miss Kenton, for her part, is in love with Stevens, but consistently frustrated in her attempts to convey those feelings, leaves her employ at Darlington Hall to marry a man she does not love.

In the end, Stevens’ pride in his professionalism cannot sustain him. He is an old man left presiding over a drastically reduced staff in a household that has since the death of Lord Darlington in large part been dust-sheeted and is now owned by a retired American congressman. The aging butler has just returned from a journey to the West Country where he hoped to convince Miss Kenton, now Mrs. Benn, who has once again left her husband, to return to Darlington Hall as housekeeper, ostensibly to relieve a staffing problem but in reality to recapture and perhaps bring into blossom the romance that he had suppressed twenty years earlier. The futility of this endeavour is, of course, a metaphor for Stevens’ failure to live a fully human life.

In reading the novel one is struck by the formality of the language of the narrator, Stevens himself, but the alert reader soon becomes aware that this is an empty formality and that Stevens is only half a man. Because the film is so overwhelmingly visual—the producers have succeeded brilliantly in reproducing the grand household of the English tradition and its inner workings—the viewer can easily be seduced into partaking in the sensual pleasures provided by the set and costume designers, the cinematographers, and the impressive estates themselves (five homes were used in the filming of the movie). All the more reason, of course, for multiple viewings.

In watching the film one is also moved to feelings of pity for Stevens as a man who is perhaps so much a captive of the rigid and rule-bound tradition of service that he does not realize until it is too late that he has wasted his life. These feelings are encouraged by the glimpses of humanity that Hopkins gives us in his brilliant portrayal of Stevens.

Unlike many film adaptations, it cannot be said that the movie version of The Remains of the Day is a lesser work than the book. The film is, in my view, a separate, but equal, pleasure.

Photo Credits

Movie poster from Wikipedia

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