In recent weeks, two fine but violent films opened here: American director Steve Kloves’ eerie “Flesh and Bone” and British director James Ivory’s poignant “The Remains of the Day.”
“The Remains of the Day?” Violent? According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, “violence” can mean (A) “physical force used so as to injure, damage or destroy;” (B) “unjust or callous use of force or power . . . and “the harm done by this;” and (C) “great force or strength of feeling, conduct or expression.”
Taken together, these definitions just about sum up the operating principles of all the memorable dramas ever to grace the stage or screen. Violence, in some form, seems requisite to dramatic conflict. “Flesh and Bone” uses violence responsibly. Although it opens with a mass murder and closes with a patricide, it is all about consequences.
“The Remains of the Day” does not contain anything so overt or the sort of acts that can be imitated by heedless youths on a restless evening-acts that have nervous politicians up in arms and censors waiting in the wings-but it is chock full of psychic and social violence, much of it self-inflicted. It implodes rather than explodes.
Its leading character, Stevens, a butler in the years around World War II, systematically smothers his soul to further his career, tuning out his own life’s cadences in order to march to the questionable beat of his master, Lord Darlington.
Darlington, a sweetly stupid gentleman of negligent privilege, uses his guilt over besting a German friend in World War I to justify furthering the Nazi cause in Britain. At one point he even insists that Stevens fire two German Jewish maids to ensure the “well-being” of his guests. The maids, it is clear, are refugees from the Nazis who may be returned to Germany.
The way the film so cunningly organizes his story, Stevens, played by Anthony Hopkins, is forever sacrificing the needs of his heart for those of the master’s hearth. In sequence after sequence, the butler’s life collides with duty, his moments of wrenching loss always overshadowed by Darlington’s “larger” activities.
While Stevens’ father, a former butler who is now an underservant in the Darlington household, lies dying of a stroke upstairs, the son stoically attends to foreign dignitaries gathered to negotiate the rearmament of Germany.
“You’re not coming down with a cold, are you?” the unaware Darlington asks, noting his butler’s pallor. “I’m all right,” Stevens replies gamely, having just given permission to close his dead father’s eyes. “A little tired perhaps.”
Proud of his ability to keep feelings at bay, Stevens completely fences out Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), the Darlington Hall housekeeper whose love he clearly requites. When it comes to passive aggression, these two take no prisoners.
After tirelessly trying to puncture his reserve, she announces-with no small amount of spite-that she is leaving to marry another. Stevens offers congratulations in a strangulated voice, then beats a hasty retreat to select a proper wine from the cellar. Later, finding her in tears, he merely notes that the alcove off the breakfast room needs dusting.
The film is full of such cruel scenes, none more savage than one in which a crony of Darlington’s humiliates Stevens by asking him a series of impossibly arcane foreign affairs questions to prove that the average man is too foolish to govern himself. This is a movie that wallops love, decency and self-respect with the same tireless ferocity as Stallone beating back the bad guys.
Adapted from a novel by the Japanese-born, English-educated Kazuo Ishiguro, “Remains” might be said to be a product of two of the world’s subtler and less accessible cultures. Cultures in which self-denial (“stiff upper lip”) and stoic repression are marks of breeding. Homogeneous cultures in which, until quite recently, the urge to exclude outsiders has approached xenophobia.
American films, on the other hand, are known worldwide for trading in easy physical violence. Much more often than not, our movies spend lavishly on violence definition (A) rather than (B) or (C).
Perhaps, in this land of heterogeneity, where we include more than we exclude, depicted physical violence has come to be how we talk to one another over the chasms between cultures, between genders and sexual preferences, between races. Certainly it has been growing steadily in films and TV over the last 20 years. Not for us the surrogate slaps of self-abnegation, the phantom punches of genocide. We’re right out there blazing away.
Anger is everywhere in American film today and physical violence seems to be its common language, a patois whose parting shots are almost always tragic. Once relegated to gangster films, mysteries and westerns-movies about worlds and events that were relatively inaccessible to the general public-injurious force has crept into virtually every area of dramatic conflict.
It doesn’t solve issues, but it expresses them, loudly and unequivocally. Our films have taken on the metaphorical flavor of national domestic shouting matches, with bullets and knives sitting in for hurled accusations and the occasional piece of crockery.
Racism? Check out the gunslingers of “Boyz ‘n the Hood” and “Menace II Society.” Sexism? “Thelma and Louise” is the obvious example here. When Louise is nearly raped, the women don’t just call for help. Thelma offs the guy. And don’t forget “Fried Green Tomatoes,” that sentimental hit in which an abusive husband winds up in the barbecue.
Homophobia? Try a bitterly shocking picture called “The Living End,” about two HIV-positive men on a homicidal tear. Even international trade is not exempt, witness the recent, sensationally graphic bloodletting in “Rising Sun.”
As with any language, the grammar of physical violence in film evolves. The rules are broken, then rebroken. Twenty-six years ago Arthur Penn stunned moviegoers when he combined violence with realism for the stylishly delivered gore of “Bonnie and Clyde,” the story of rampaging-and celebrated-lovers who meet with an appropriately bloody end.
This fall, on the other hand, brought us “True Romance,” an outrageously cynical tale of a pair who court a different sort of notoriety (the young man believes he is being true to Elvis). They wade through an abattoir of a plot on their way to happily-ever-after, and the tone of the film is disconcertingly tongue-in-cheek. The grisly moments are played for real but their context is right up against farce.
Does a film like “True Romance,” whose writer, Quentin Tarantino, is a young meteor on the Hollywood scene, mean we’ve come full circle? Is a new generation of artists getting so inured to physical violence it has become the stuff of parody? This summer’s “The Last Action Hero” also parodied movie violence, though far less subversively. It bombed, and the fall crop of film listings is remarkably low on pulp.
So the door now may be open in Hollywood to dramas where the scathing words of a spouse can be seen to butcher love as surely as the fist, and to thrillers solved with clues instead of guns. The remains of our day may be at hand. But it won’t be gentle. It will just look that way.
