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DVD
Image Entertainment
Publisher: Merchant Ivory
Pierre Lhomme
Format: Anamorphic, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
Actors: James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Hugh Grant, Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow
Set against the stifling conformity of pre-World War I English society, E.M. Forster’s Maurice is a story of coming to terms with one’s sexuality and identity in the face of disapproval and misunderstanding. Maurice Hall (James Wilby) and Clive Durham (Hugh Grant) find themselves in love at Cambridge. In a time when homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment, the two must keep their feelings for one another a complete secret, even though Clive refuses to allow their relationship to move beyond the boundaries of "platonic" love. After a friend is arrested and disgraced for "the unspeakable crime of the Greeks," Clive abandons his forbidden love, marries, and enters into the political arena. Maurice, however, struggles with questions of his identity and self-confidence, even seeking the help of a hypnotist to rid himself of his undeniable urges. But while staying with Clive and his shallow wife, Anne, Maurice is seduced by the affectionate and yearning servant Alec Scudder, (Rupert Graves), an event that brings about profound changes in Maurice’s life and outlook. Sparking direction by James Ivory, a distinguished performance from the ensemble cast, and a charged score by Richard Robbins all combine to create a film of undeniable power, one that is both romantic and moving, and a story of love and self-discovery for all audiences.
The second of the three Merchant/Ivory films adapting E.M. Forster novels (between A Room with a View and Howard's End), Maurice deals with a theme few period pieces dare mention--a young man's struggle with his homosexuality. It's not just a gay coming-of-age story, however. The hero wrestles with British class society as much as his personal and sexual identity. The film opens on a stormy, windswept beach, as an older man awkwardly instructs young, fatherless Maurice Hall (James Wilby) in the "sacred mysteries" of sex. The same turbulent, wordless struggle with passion lasts throughout this slowly evolving, beautifully filmed story. Novelist E.M. Forster's brainy, British melodrama hinges on choice and compulsion, as the pensive hero falls for two completely different men. First comes frail, suppressed Clive (Hugh Grant), who wants nothing more than classical Platonic harmony... and a straight lifestyle. (Grant's performance is so convincing, one wonders how he ever became a heterosexual sex symbol.) After Clive's wedding, Maurice turns to hypnosis to cure his unspeakable longings. Unfortunately, his "cure" is interrupted by Clive's lustful, brooding, barely literate gamekeeper Scudder (Rupert Graves), a worker more at home gutting rabbits than discussing the classics. Maurice's love for a "social inferior" forces him to confront his illicit desire and his ingrained class snobbery. --Grant Balfour
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| Merchant-Ivory/Criterion Collection Excellence |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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The amazing thing about the Merchant-Ivory/Criterion Collection 2-disc Maurice DVD set is the Extras. (The same film was just re-released on DVD in the U.K. by Film 4 with NO extras.) The 12 deleted scenes are a revelation, ten of which have commentary by James Ivory. The interviews with Ivory, Wilby, Grant, Graves and others, reflecting back on the film, add perspective. Wilby left a stage performance and started filming Maurice within days, with few read-throughs. We learn that Julian Sands from Room with a View was supposed to play Maurice, but became unavailable. I, for one, am grateful.
Having seen the film before reading the book I was surprised to notice that the film episode with Risley being arrested is not in the book, but was deemed necessary to explain why Grant's character decides to "go straight," and this is explained both in the DVD notes and in the Extras. In fact, the deleted scenes show that this subplot was taken even further, but then cut back. Also cut was a subplot involving Maurice's attempted seduction of a young houseguest. (The first cut of the film was three hours.)
The film has received typical Criterion Collection quality treatment from a high definition scan of the interpositive that was then digitally cleaned. However, there are no obvious digital artifacts introduced, unlike the Blu ray release of Gladiator. Maybe there will be a Blu ray release of Maurice from Criterion eventually. They have released a Blu ray of Howard's End.
This film directly followed Room with a View and is a suitable companion piece, though Maurice is darker. Rupert Graves, in the interviews, claims he apologized to Ivory for being so saucy in Room, but was then put at ease when he was re-hired for Maurice. Both Wilby and Graves received many, many letters from grateful gay men, though neither is gay.
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| BUY THIS MOVIE |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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When I was 12,I first saw this movie,I am gay and was very open about it back then too,I am 25 now,this movie taught me a lot and from there on,I have always loved this wonderful,HEARTBREAKING,in the end very respectful AND TRUE to how it really was in the early and even late 20'th century,WOW,how things have changed,I hope kids in school do not get picked on as much as when i was in the late 90's.BTW,SCUTTER is HHHOOOOTTT
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| A classic gay film |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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This should be in every gays collection of films. Although it is set in another time period, the care and love that two men can have for each other shines through.
A must see film for gay genre.
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| Simply Beautiful |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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What a lovely & well made movie. I never would have thought a scene of a chaste 2 seconds first hug between Hugh Grant & James Wilby could be so hot! All of the actors did a great job of conveying the deep, passionate emotions narrated in the book while behaving within the Edwardian convention of conduct. There are definitely some passionate scenes that I have rewinded over & over again because they are so romantic! I would highly recommend the book as well - it is amazingly relevant a century later.
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| Gorgeous and moving |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I first read this book in the summer of 2003 and then had my boyfriend buy me the DVD for Valentine's Day 2004. I'm not sure how many times I've watched this movie since, but it's at least fifteen if not twenty. If, for the rest of my life, I were only allowed to watch five movies, this would be one of them. I never get bored with this movie because there are so many little details to notice and I find a new one almost every time. Every single element is well-done, from the acting to the sets to the costumes to the absolutely beautiful score.
I'm also impressed with the casting. James Wilby has the perfect blandly attractive look for Maurice, Forster's "ordinary" protagonist, but the pensieve emotion he puts into the character makes him anything but bland. Hugh Grant, in one of his early roles, displays the same ease in playing a sensitive snob that he has in some of his later films, but with none of the self-consciousness and manufactured charm that have marred much of his work over the last fifteen years or so. After a while I forgot it even was Hugh Grant. As for Rupert Graves, he inhabits his character with all the charm, roughness, and lack of inhibition required for Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper who proves to be Maurice's salvation. In the smaller roles, credit is due to Phoebe Nicholls, who plays Anne, Clive's wife, and Mark Tandy as Risley, Maurice and Clive's entertainingly pretentious friend from Cambridge.
"Maurice" is a sweepingly romantic film about a man altered by love, propelled by his overwhelming passion from a state of unthinking and uninspired existence to depths of emotion that cause him to question everything he thought he knew about his place in the world. When we first see Maurice as an adolescent boy, his life appears to be already planned for him; he will finish his current school, begin a new one, grow up to become an Edwardian gentleman, and marry an appropriate young lady. "I think I shan't marry," the young Maurice tells his teacher, Mr Ducie, who laughs it off as one of those ridiculous things children say. And indeed, when we see the barely-adult Maurice at Cambridge, his early thoughts of societal rebellion appear to have gone nowhere; he's an unremarkable undergraduate whose attempts at insight sound more recited than believed. Contrast the dull and inarticulate Maurice having dinner with the Dean to the bold, clear-thinking, defiant man of the film's last few scenes and the contrast is extraordinary.
The DVD extras are entertaining; I particularly enjoyed Rupert Graves's comment that, after the release of the film, he received an abundance of fan mail from Japanese schoolgirls. The extras also offer a number of deleted scenes that will be of particular interest to viewers who have read the novel.
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