Curapedi
I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.
spencergrande6
This film truly envelopes you in its world. It is immaculately constructed and warms you in an atmosphere of such a specific time and place you feel wholly part of it. I just wish I felt the same way about the "romance" at the center of this. It's not that I didn't buy it I just never felt it and I get that Hopkins (who gives a greatly restrained and impassioned performance) is supposed to be withholding but I didn't get the fierce devotion that seemingly developed between him and Thompson. There are some gorgeously composed and affecting scenes at the end but they feel separate from the whole.
mnpollio
Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are two thespians who could arguably make reading the telephone book into a vivid experience, but even their copious talents are sorely tested with this pointless drawing room melodrama of manners. The Remains of the Day is yet another in a seemingly endless parade of staid British interior decorating historical dramas that propagated during the 1980s-1990s from the Merchant-Ivory stable. When the concept worked, one had solid films like Howard's End or A Room With a View. When it failed, you got The Remains of the Day.Set circa WW2, stiff, rule-bound butler Hopkins finds his narrow worldview challenged by the arrival of sunny head housekeeper Thompson, who is not afraid to lock horns with him in his British manor domain. The relationship ostensibly moves from friction to grudging respect to something much deeper.There are a number of problems that plague The Remains of the Day that hinder the enjoyment of it, despite the best efforts of its leads. Despite being sprinkled with some notable performers, the supporting cast is shamefully underused and forgettable. Everyone seems to have been directed to underact to the point of catatonia. Even Thompson, playing a somewhat more vibrant character than her cast members, seems unduly restrained here.The pace can generously be described as sluggish. This is made worse in that most modern audiences will not understand or relate to servants who give up all hope of lives for themselves in order to live vicariously through buffoonish upper crust snobs. Nothing brings this home more so than the ludicrous sequence wherein Hopkins refuses to present at the side of his father's deathbed so that he can ostensibly serve drinks to the Nazi-sympathizing lord of the manor (played on one strident note by James Fox). This episode may well be historically accurate, but it seems a foolish move to a modern viewer and fails to endear the lead character, whose emotions are often so repressed throughout the film as to make him seem robotic.Worse, there is no character arc here. We open the film with Hopkins strait-jacketed into his role as an unbending, unemotional servant. There are moments throughout where he has some obvious interior struggle, especially with the arrival of Thompson, but he never breaks through this facade. When Thompson's character resigns from the manor in protest, we again think that there will be some forward momentum for Hopkins's butler, but again he fails to change. At the climax, we are again led to believe that Hopkins may break free of these now self-imposed bonds of behavior and social class mores, when American Christopher Reeve buys the manor and encourages him to take his first ever vacation. Hopkins does so only grudgingly and seeks out Thompson, ostensibly to convey his unrequited feelings, but yet again fails to do so. In fairness, Hopkins plays the role to the hilt, but nothing can disguise that he is playing a dull man. This character changes nary a jot throughout the film; he is the same rigid, hopeless creation at the end as he is at the start. With no emotional investment or character arc, the most we can summon is some minor pity. Although truthfully one may well also wonder why so much time (and this film does seem glacially long) should be wasted on such an intractable and uninteresting man.Just in case we have not gotten the "message" of the film (such as it is), it concludes with a laughably heavy-handed segment where Hopkins stares frozen and slack-jawed at a pigeon that has gotten into the manor and seems trapped there. Get it! The pigeon is like him! Trapped in the manor and unable to free itself! This is for all the slow learners that did not get what was hammered home for the lengthy running time preceding this moment. Critics and Oscar voters, of course, love pretentious twaddle like this and could not resist raining down kudos, but it does little more than serve as proof that film elites really like boring British dramas set in tastefully decorated manor houses.
