Themes: Questioning Sexuality, Sexual Awakening, Class Differences
Main Cast: James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow
Release Year: 1987
Country: UK
Run Time: 139 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Director James Ivory brings his subdued, "Masterpiece Theater" style to a forbidden subject -- homosexual love. Maurice is based on E.M. Forster's suppressed 1914 novel that was held back from publication until after his death. The film takes place at Cambridge, before World War I, when homosexuality was outlawed in Great Britain. Clive (Hugh Grant), an aristocratic Englishman with a life of privilege, suddenly shocks his close friend Maurice (James Wilby) by declaring his love for him. Maurice is initially stunned by the pronouncement, but in the end finds himself giving Clive a passionate kiss and telling him that he loves him as well. Clive, in the stiff-upper-lip British manner, considers their love to be more of an intellectual concept, but Maurice becomes passionate about the affair. Clive, afraid of being exposed as a homosexual, backs off and breaks up with Maurice for marriage, family, and politics. Maurice is crestfallen, but then he has a passionate affair with Clive's gamekeeper, Scudder (Rupert Graves), and Maurice and Scudder decide to risk their reputations by openly living together as lovers. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
Review
Written in 1914, but published only after its author's death because he didn't wish to cause a scandal, Maurice is E.M. Forster's most personal novel, though it's also his least meaty. Unlike most of Merchant-Ivory's other Forster adaptations, then, Maurice boils its source material down to an essence without losing any of the flavor. As the callow title character, James Wilby does a good job fumbling toward self-knowledge in a social landscape devoid of self-help manuals or vaguely respectable role models. His character's arc may have become a tad overfamiliar in the years since the book was written, let alone since the movie came out, but in the context of pre-World War I England, it resonates. Hugh Grant, meanwhile, gets to have all the fun as Clive Durham, the lover who lapses from intellectual devotion into self-delusion as adulthood plies its many pressures. James Ivory's script insists on depicting Clive as a clear-cut closet case rather than exploring the ambiguous conception of homosexuality in an era before modern ideas about sexual orientation had taken shape. It's to Grant's credit, then, that he makes Clive's inner torment so wrenching. Rupert Graves' gay groundskeeper doesn't show up till the third act, but his unvarnished charm adds some much-needed grit and momentum to a film that sometimes seems to depict coming out of the closet as an endless attack of the vapors. Ultimately, Forster's conflation of working-class vitality with personal freedom is a little too pat for modern audiences. But, seen in its historical context as both a novel and a film, Maurice is as interesting as it is entertaining. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Billie Whitelaw - Mrs. Hall; Ben Kingsley - Lasker-Jones; Judy Parfitt - Mrs. Durham; Phoebe Nicholls - Anne Durham; Mark Tandy - Risley; Helena Michell - Ada Hall; Kitty Aldridge - Kitty Hall; Patrick Godfrey - Simcox; Michael Jenn - Archie; Barry Foster - Dean Cornwalis; Peter Eyre - Mr. Borenius; Catherine Rabett - Pippa Durham; Orlando Wells - Young Maurice; Helena Bonham Carter - Bonham,Young Lady at Cricket Match; Maria Britneva - Mrs. Sheepshanks; Philip Fox - Dr. Jowitt; Breffini McKenna - Breffni/Guardsman; Mark Payton - Chapman; Mathew Sim - Fetherstonhaugh; Andrew St. Clair - Undergraduate; Rick Warner - Judge; Chris Hunter - Fred Scudder; John Elmes - Hill; Alan Foss - Old Man at Train; Olwen Griffiths - Mrs. Scudder; Gerald McArthur - Undergraduate; Miles Richarson - Undergraduate; Philada Sewell - Matron; Harriet Thorpe - Barmaid; Julian Wadham - Hull; Alan Whybrow - Mr. Scudder
Credit
Peter James - Art Director, Paul Bradley - Associate Producer, Celestia Fox - Casting, Jenny Beavan - Costume Designer, John Bright - Costume Designer, Michael Zimbrich - First Assistant Director, James Ivory - Director, Katherine Wenning - Editor, Richard Robbins - Composer (Music Score), Mary Hillman - Makeup, Brian Ackland-Snow - Production Designer, Pierre Lhomme - Cinematographer, Alex Leyton - Cinematographer, Ismail Merchant - Producer, Mike Shoring - Sound/Sound Designer, Kit Hesketh-Harvey - Screenwriter, James Ivory - Screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Screenwriter, E.M. Forster - Book Author
Maurice is 11 at the beginning of the film, rather than 14. The film omits almost all of the novel's philosophical dialogue, and also many subplots such as Maurice's lust for the schoolboy Dickie (the scenes dealing with this subplot were deleted from the final cut). It expands the Wildean character of Lord Risley and his 6-month imprisonment with hard labour for homosexual conduct (he is not imprisoned in the novel), in order to dramatise the dangers of Edwardian homosexuality and provide a plot device by which Clive feels he must reject Maurice. No such plot device was in the novel. In one deleted scene released in the 2002 edition, Risley actually ends up committing suicide, but this was not shown in the film.
While undergoing hypnosis by Dr. Lasker-Jones in a desperate attempt to "cure" himself, Maurice reveals to him that he has slept with Alec Scudder. Lasker-Jones warns Maurice that at one time homosexuals were executed in Britain. In spite of this warning, Lasker-Jones, especially in the film, seems to be the most affirming character. Despite most of society's condemnations, he suggests that Maurice consider relocating to a country where homosexuality is not illegal and more tolerated, like France or Italy. Maurice asks him if England will ever change its attitudes towards homosexuality, to which Lasker-Jones replied that "England has always been disinclined to accept human nature."
The place of the final tryst between Maurice and Alec Scudder has a certain homoerotic symbolism when seen in the movie; the pseudo-Elizabethan boathouse alludes both to the Arts and Crafts movement that was so associated with Edward Carpenter (a visit by E.M. Forster to Carpenter and his lover George Merrill inspired the writing of Maurice), and also to the Elizabethan England of Christopher Marlowe ("all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools") and the Sonnets of Shakespeare. In the novel the "greenwood and the night" serve as the place of refuge, and the boathouse is only alluded to.
DVD
In 2002 a special edition DVD of the film was released with a new documentary and deleted scenes with director's commentary.
