Word: darlington
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KAZUO ISHIGURO'S THE REMAINS of the Day (1989) is an astonishing novel in several regards. Its narrator, an aging and obsessively punctilious butler named Stevens, sets out in 1956 on a motoring trip; he wants to persuade Miss Kenton, a former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, to come back and work for the house's new American owner. But as Stevens remembers the good old days, the 1930s, his dry reserve and matter-of-fact tone are threatened by a troubling perception: perhaps his devotion to Lord Darlington, later disgraced for having tried to appease the Nazis, was misplaced. Near...
...least of these difficulties is the fact that the novel is narrated in the first person. At the beginning of both film and novel, Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), a butler at Darlington Hall, is about to begin a road trip about England. This physical journey is from the start linked to a spiritual quest. The narrator of the book, Mr. Stevens, does not intend to wander aimlessly about the country; rather, he embarks on a pilgrimage, resolved to restore Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, to her erstwhile position. He hardly even concerns himself with...
This shift of emphasis in characterization also affects the rest of the film. The movie frequently omits material necessary for us to understand the psychological state of the characters. For instance, in one scene Lord Darlington appears enamored of a countess who awkwardly lip-synches a German song, while in a slightly later scene, he insists that two Jewish serving girls be dismissed; what is not made clear in the movie is that he dismisses the two girls under the romantic influence of the countess, and that, when, feeling somewhat guilty a year later, he attempts to trace...
...have peppered the story with deft details that illuminate the cottage industry of running a lavish estate: snipped hedges, gleaming doorknobs, decapitated fowl, the Times pages freshly ironed each morning. And they have filled the house with a perfect cast: Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton; James Fox as Lord Darlington; Peter Vaughn as Stevens' father, the proud old retainer who will never say die -- even when he does. These characters, like those in The Age of Innocence, are all genteel anachronisms. They sin, in our eyes, by not daring to sin; they are poignant in their fidelity to tattered principles...
...film is even more discreet, more Stevens-like, than the book. They have withheld the revelations of tears and admission of heartbreak that finally clatter around the butler like broken Wedgwood. Here, Stevens will never wake violently from his reverie of duty served; he will be trapped in Darlington Hall like a bird that can't find an open window. So the filmmakers have dared believe that the audience will detect these domestic cataclysms in the performance of the man who plays Stevens...