James Ivory Films | James Ivory Filmography | James Ivory Biography | James Ivory Career | James Ivory Awards

The work of James Ivory was a fixture in independent filmmaking of the late 1960s and 1970s. Roseland, for example, Ivory's omnibus film about the habitu?s of a decaying New York dance palace, garnered a standing ovation at its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1977, and received much critical attention afterward. However, it was not until A Room with a View, his stately adaptation of E. M. Forster 's novel, that Ivory gained full international recognition. The name-making films Ivory directed earlier in the 1980s?which included adaptations of two Forster works and two Henry James novels among them?linked him inextricably with the contemporary British cinema's tradition of urbane, even ultra-genteel, costume-dramas.

Ivory's independence, his influential involvement with English film, and his sustained collaborative partnership with producer Ismail Merchant invite comparisons with an earlier pairing in British cinema, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Both teams have found themselves attracted to material dealing with the effects of sexual repression or with the clash of differing cultures, as in, for example, Black Narcissus (Powell/Fressburger, 1947) or The Europeans (Ivory/Merchant, 1979). But while Powell and Pressburger worked with various forms of visual experimentation, employing heightened colors, frequently moving cameras, and various forms of cinematographic juxtaposition to achieve an opulent, metaphorical visual texture, Ivory's work represents a distinct retrenchment, a withdrawal from visual hyperbole, a comparative conservatism of visual style. An example of one of Ivory's few attempts at visual expressionism (a moment in his work that seems directly inspired by Powell, in fact) illustrates this point. In The Bostonians, Ivory attempts to express Olive Chancellor's hysteria by using stylized colors and superimposition in isolated dream sequences. Because the film's style is deeply rooted in naturalism, unlike that of Powell, the sequences look stilted and awkward, remarkably out of place in the context of the film.

The naturalism of Ivory's style often perfectly complements the director's interest in the dynamics of isolated communities: the drama troupe in Shakespeare Wallah, for example, or the dancers in Roseland, or the members of the New York downtown-punk scene in Slaves of New York. Ivory's films characteristically trace the formation of community around a common interest?or, more often, a common flaw or a shared loss?and his powers of observation are enlivened by attention to minute details of gesture and a keen sympathy for marginal characters. It is this sympathy that attracts him to works such as Evan Connell's novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge. Ivory thus provides a densely ironic but ultimately sympathetic account of the quietly desperate middle-class lives of the Bridges in Kansas City. This sympathy accounts as well for Ivory's handling of characters such as Charlotte Bartlett in Room with a View. In Forster's novel, Miss Bartlett is lampooned tirelessly, emerging as one of the novel's chief examples of English hypocrisy and Forster's conception of high culture as the poison of the spirit (this is in spite of a half-hearted reprieve for the character in the novel's last pages). In the film, Maggie Smith's agile, witty performance makes the character far more appealing, and Ivory's treatment of the character (he cuts from the lovers' final union to shots of Miss Bartlett's soundless, unbending loneliness) shows that he clearly interprets her as a fully sympathetic character of great pathos.

Ivory's two Forster adaptations, Room with a View and Maurice, may well prove to be the high-water mark of his career. These two films do more than demonstrate Ivory's often bracingly literary sensibility (most of Ivory's films are adaptations that doggedly strive for extreme ?faithfulness? to their source material): In the Forster adaptations, this ?faithfulness? co-exists with crucial shifts of emphasis that provide, simultaneously, modern interpretations of the texts.

An example of this occurs in the scene of the murder in the square in Room with a View. In its use of hand-held cameras, graphic matches, and rhythmic editing, which provides mercurial shifts in the tone of the sequence from gravity to exultation, the sequence becomes one of the film's set-pieces, supplying the complexities that Forster largely avoids in his comparatively laconic treatment of the scene.

The work of Ivory, Merchant, and Jhabvala has become even more distinguished as they have aged. Upon its theatrical release, Howards End (directed by Ivory, produced by Merchant and scripted by Prawer Jhabvala) was justifiably hailed as the best film ever in their long and distinguished careers. This stylish work is yet another adaptation of an E. M. Forster novel. Its scenario examines a popular Ivory theme, exploring the repercussions when social classes come together at a specific point in recent history (in this case, at the close of the Edwardian era in England). Emma Thompson is altogether brilliant in the role that solidified her career. She plays a cheeky and individualistic young woman who does not come from a monied background, and who is slyly charmed by a prosperous gentleman (Anthony Hopkins) whose upper class facade hides a deceitful and heartless disposition.

The Remains of the Day is nearly as fine a film as Howards End. Based on the acclaimed novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the scenario dissects the personality of an ideal servant: Stevens (Hopkins), a reserved British butler who is singlemindedly dedicated to his employer, Lord Darlington (fames Fox). The time is between the World Wars. No matter that the misguided Darlington is perilously flirting with Nazism. No matter that Miss Kenton (Thompson), the new housekeeper, might be a potential romantic partner. Stevens is steadfastly absorbed in his professional role, to the exclusion of all else. He knows only to suppress his needs, feelings, and desires, all in the name of service to his master. The Remains of the Day essentially is a character study of Stevens, who is superbly played by the ever-reliable Hopkins. It is yet one more in a line of Ivory's meticulous period dramas.

The period drama Jefferson in Paris concerns the American Thomas Jefferson, one of America's founding fathers, shown here as the U.S. Ambassador to France. However, the film is several shades below the best of the previous Ivory-Merchant-Jhabvala collaborations. While Jefferson in Paris captures a time and place with exquisite detail, the level of detail included in the film renders the narrative all too episodic in quality. Still, Ivory offers a full-bodied portrayal of Jefferson (Nick Nolte), while depicting a large range of his personal and political involve ments. Most intriguing of all is the paradox of Jefferson's disgust with the overindulgences of the French aristocracy combined with his agonized collusion in keeping the status quo with regard to the maintenance of slavery as an American ?institution.? In Jefferson in Paris, Ivory yet again depicts his theme of class differences, exploring the invisible walls that separate those classes. Only here, class is measured by the color of one's skin. Even though individuals share the same bloodlines because of sexual liaisons between master and slave, those with black skin are enslaved by those with white skin. Ivory portrays the widowed Jefferson as a man who falls in love with a married woman (Greta Scacchi), and has a sexual tryst with Sally Hemings (Thandie Newton), a teenaged slave girl. It remains uncertain if the latter affair ever happened. For this reason, Jefferson in Paris was the subject of debate and controversy among Jeffersonian scholars.?JAMES MORRISON and ROB EDELMAN