The Bostonians (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Ismail Merchant; directed by James Ivory; screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on Henry James’s novel; cinematography by Water Lassally; production design by Leo Austin; edited by Mark Potter Jr. and Katherine Wenning; music by Richard Robbins; starring Christopher Reeve, Vanessa Redgrave, Jessica Tandy, Madeleine Potter, Linda Hunt, and Wallace Shawn. Blu-ray and DVD, Color, 122 min., 1984. A Cohen Film Collection release.

Certain lazy critics have turned the good name of Merchant Ivory Productions into a joke, a slur, or a shorthand term for “heritage” movies peddling sentimentalized stories with reactionary attitudes. Like any company with a long list of pictures spanning more than four decades and an array of genres, Merchant Ivory has made its share of misfires, but I’ve long maintained that no filmmakers have a better record for creating thoughtful, literate, civilized entertainments. Nor have the main members of the team—producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—made “good taste,” a bane of many films that are reactionary heritage products, into an arbitrary constraint, as numerous examples attest: the sex in The Wild Party (1975), the romping nudes in A Room with a View (1985), the male-to-male kissing in Maurice (1987), and so on, including the tinges of lesbian attraction in The Bostonians, their 1984 adaptation of Henry James’s 1886 novel. In a video interview on the Cohen Film Collection’s new Blu-ray edition of the latter film, Ivory avers that a “subversive” streak runs through the company’s work, and while I think that’s stretching the point, the subtly formed subtext of The Bostonians evokes gay sensibilities once taboo for mainstream movies in a manner that respects the reticence of the novel’s era while speaking to the more liberated outlook of our own.

Not that gay concerns are the only interests of a story that focuses more on gender than sexuality, more on political passion than the romantic kind. The character James describes as “the most important personage” of the tale is not a Bostonian woman but a Mississippian man, seeking a better life in the North after the disruptions wrought by the Civil War on his region, his family, and his prospects. His name is Basil Ransom (Christopher Reeve), and as an unreconstructed legatee of the antebellum South’s benighted views, he represents a way of thinking guaranteed to disturb the progressive New Englanders with whom he starts to hobnob after his northward migration.

Basil is the glue holding the narrative together, but the key women of the tale command more interest on both page and screen. They are Bostonians born and bred: fastidious, humorless Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave), who believes in the cause of women’s rights with a zealousness her Puritan forbears could envy, and naive, fresh-faced Verena Tarrant (Madeleine Potter), a youngster whose gift for oratory strikes Olive as an ideal instrument for the furtherance of her feminist crusade. Among the other notable characters are Verena’s father, Selah Tarrant (Wesley Addy), a mesmeric healer with few scruples; journalist Matthias Pardon (Wallace Shawn), who prowls the sidelines for news and gossip; Mary Prance (Linda Hunt), an independent-minded physician; and frail, elderly Miss Birdseye (Jessica Tandy), who used to travel through the South campaigning for racial equality. It’s worth noting that the struggle against slavery had close ties to the subsequent fight for women’s rights, since many leading feminists of James’s time—Julia Ward Howe, Susan B. Anthony—had cultivated their skills in the earlier abolitionist movement. (In a 1984 interview with me, Reeve intriguingly mentioned Verena’s spiritualist father in this regard as well, seeing roots of nineteenth-century feminism in the séance as well as the political arena.) 

Basil falls for Verena as soon he meets her, only to discover that the person who introduced them is an unyielding rival for her allegiance: his distant cousin Olive, who has enlisted the young woman in the feminist ranks, channeled her public-speaking talents in the directions dictated by their cause, and made her promise to shun all other commitments, marriage specifically included. Olive sees herself as a priestess, Verena as her acolyte, and Basil as a distraction who presence bodes no good. Basil sees himself as a desirable bachelor, Verena as a scrumptious morsel, and Olive’s movement as a load of hooey. Conflicts ensue and misunderstandings abound as the narrative shifts from Boston and Cambridge to New York and Cape Cod and back again. As in most of James’s novels, not much happens in the way of action but a great deal happens in the way of thoughts, feelings, and nuances of word and gesture that reveal worlds of complicated experience.

Merchant and Ivory first made their name with India-themed pictures like The Householder (1963) and Shakespeare Wallah (1965), but today they’re best known for literary adaptations drawing on authors (James, E. M. Forster) whose high-culture status made them unlikely sources even in art-cinema circles. The Bostonians was their second James picture, arriving between The Europeans in 1979 and The Golden Bowl in 2000. It originated in a project floated in the early Eighties by Boston television station WGBH, which hoped to produce a package of films about the James family—author Henry, philosopher William, diarist Alice, and theologian Henry Sr.—by various filmmakers, capped off by a Merchant Ivory movie of the novelist’s most conspicuously Bostonian book. Funding shortages sank the larger enterprise, but since Jhabvala had completed a screenplay for the adaptation, Merchant Ivory forged ahead with it. It opened to good reviews. Vincent Canby called it “a rare delight…acted to passionate perfection,” while Roger Ebert deemed it “intelligent and subtle” and I found it “thoughtful and engaging (if not so deep or imposing) as its source,” a judgment that still seems right to me. Ivory says feminists were divided fifty-fifty in their ideological assessments of the film when it was new.

James wrote The Bostonians after his own migration from the United States to Europe—like Basil, he no longer felt at home on his native turf—and excised it from the New York Edition of his collected fiction. (He left out The Europeans and Washington Square as well.) Ivory brings up that omission in interviews on the Cohen disc, offering two reasons for it. One is that James felt Miss Birdseye satirized the “early suffragette type” too broadly for comfort, given the character’s marked similarities to distinguished members of New England’s transcendentalist circle. The other, more interesting reason was that James found the intense relationship between Olive and Verena uncomfortably close to the “Boston marriage” between his own sister and the woman with whom she lived and traveled for many years.

It’s more likely that James excluded The Bostonians from the American collection simply because so many Americans found it offensive, but Ivory’s remarks about the Boston marriage (which Jhabvala also mentions) point to an aspect of the story that resonates today. The film’s portrayal of Olive and Verena keeps sexual undertones resolutely below the surface, present if you look for them but otherwise discreet to the point of invisibility except at a climactic moment when Olive fears Verena is gone forever—either absconded with by Basil or drowned in a getaway attempt—and rushes into their Cape Cod cottage, finds that her friend has not abandoned her, and sweeps her face with kisses that are as ambiguous as they are eager. Discussing the prudent nature of the movie in general and this episode in particular, Ivory observes that “latent homosexuality” may or may not have been in James’s mind, but that in any case he wanted the film to convey the “lesbian feeling” of the story without making a “lesbian romance” out of it. It’s this sort of circumspection that has allowed Ivory to maintain an uber-respectable career while thinking of himself as a subversive figure. To my mind he has succeeded nicely.

The film’s most noticeable departure from the novel is, for better or worse, the happy ending. James concludes with Verena fleeing the scene of her imminent oratorical triumph at the Boston Music Hall, arm in arm with the victorious Basil, overwhelmed with contradictory feelings and weeping the first of many tears she is “destined to shed” as her “far from brilliant” marriage takes its course in time to come. She isn’t crying at the end of the movie, and the film’s tacked-on coda shows Olive commencing an eloquent feminist lecture in her place, hardly as discomposed as one might expect a few moments after her friend, protégé, and (perhaps) soulmate has abruptly absconded. Addressing this in a video extra, the filmmakers are unrepentant and unpersuasive. Jhabvala says Olive deserves a happy outcome because she’s a pioneer of a wonderful movement, and Ivory says a movie ending needs a “lift” so the audience won’t find it too downbeat. Goodbye, subversion.

As a whole, Jhabvala’s screenplay is a bit on the sober side, turning a slyly semicomic novel into what could have become a melodrama if Ivory’s reliably meticulous style didn’t save the day for refinement and finesse, elegantly assisted by Walter Lassally’s bracing cinematography and Richard Robbins’s mood-enhancing music. But any ambitious drama depends largely on its casting and performances, and here the news is generally excellent. According to one of Ivory’s video interviews, Glenn Close was the first choice to play Olive until scheduling ruled her out. The second choice was Redgrave, who rejected Olive as the sort of character she’d never, ever play, then reversed herself when her political activism (her support for the PLO raised a major ruckus) made skittish Hollywood studios reluctant to hire her. She got the part, and her Olive is a richly three-dimensional figure throughout, save only the lead-in to the aforementioned cottage scene, where Ivory gives rein to her occasional penchant for emoting too much instead of just enough. Reeve may well have used Clark Gable as a model—like Ivory, he evidently saw Basil as a Rhett Butler type—although his performance is more naturalistic than anything Gable might have given. Potter, then a pert newcomer, gives the requisite innocence and charm to Verena, and the supporting cast could hardly be more impressive: Tandy as gentle Miss Birdseye, Hunt as sturdy Dr. Prance, Shawn as raggedy-haired Pardon, Addy as the oily elder Tarrant, and Nancy Marchand as a supercilious matron in Olive’s orbit.

In one of the new edition’s video extras, Ivory places The Bostonians in a line of “gay films” that started with his Autobiography of a Princess in 1975. This directness about sexuality is relatively new for him; in past years I moderated a number of onstage dialogues with him and Merchant, and even when discussing a forthrightly gay picture like Maurice they always steered away from linking the contents of their movies with their personal lives, however open a secret their own longtime companionship was. It’s enormously heartening that gay overtones can now be front and center in public discourse about The Bostonians, which is also plenty compelling for other reasons, from the pleasures of its images and performances to its ingenuity in adapting the psychological interiority of a perennially film-resistant author. The only downsides of the Cohen Film Collection release are its skimpy extras package (overlapping interviews, mostly) and its below-par technical quality, with images that should be more crystalline and sound that should be less muddy. But the movie itself is still robust, timeless as an excursion into Henry James and timelier than ever as a study of repressed sexuality in a bygone era whose sociocultural influence still reverberates today.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video and author or editor of fifteen books.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1