A movie governed by twin regrets, The Remains of the Day stars Anthony Hopkins as an aging butler at a faded British estate who quietly bemoans two things from decades earlier: his failure to open his heart to a former housekeeper (Emma Thompson) and his willful ignorance toward his onetime employer’s Nazi sympathies. One has entombed Stevens, the butler, in a life of loneliness, the other in shame.
A Merchant-Ivory production (Ismail Merchant producing, James Ivory directing, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapting the Kazuo Ishiguro novel into the screenplay), Remains is among their most visually rich efforts. To bridge the two eras of Darlington Hall—1958 and pre-World War II—there are moments when servants from the 1930s fade away, like ghosts, as they walk down the halls. Another motif involves point-of-view shots through keyholes and peepholes, as Stevens’ all-seeing eye monitors every movement on the estate—but always discreetly, from a distance.
Discretion is Stevens’ motto in both his professional and personal life, eventually to his despair. He loves his work—whistling while measuring the silverware placement for a dinner—yet that’s as much emotion as he’ll allow himself to show. He even saves his chuckles for private responses to his own thoughts, as he can’t imagine expressing such openness to anyone else. One of the many shattering moments demonstrating the extent of his repression comes when Stevens’ much older father, whom he’s hired at Darlington Hall, suffers a stroke while sweeping. Upon seeing his father on his knees, one hand still grasping his cleaning cart, Stevens allows a shudder of terror to cross his face, then quickly erases it so that he can tend to the matter as professionally as possible.
Then there is his relationship with Thompson’s Miss Kenton, a kind soul who sees enough goodness in Stevens to develop affection for him and possibly save him from himself. Stevens will have none of it, of course, even if somewhere beneath that prim uniform he cares deeply for her. Consider the layers of loss and longing Hopkins gives to this line, offered as an aside when a visitor praises Miss Kenton’s housekeeping: “I’d be lost without her.”
Thompson is wonderful, delivering a performance that is the flip side of Hopkins’. Her Miss Kenton is a genial open book, hiding nothing and serving everyone. (It must irk Stevens that she can be so unreserved and still excel at her job.) Thompson also brings real heat to a scene in which Kenton tries to steal a glance at a book Stevens is reading, backing him into a corner and bringing her face next to his. In such moments of unrequited yearning—to say nothing of its anguished ending—The Remains of the Day belongs in the same conversation as Wong Kar-wai’s lush, masterful In the Mood for Love. Both swoon in secret.
