150 Word Review: 'Remains Of The Day' (1993)
Why do you always have to pretend?
He is most famous for playing a serial killer, but two-time Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkin's finest, most moving, performance is in director James Ivory's clear-eyed look at Lords and their lessers in the English countryside of the 1930s—a rural and peaceful time, but war looms.
Hopkins is Mr. Stevens, a dignified second-generation butler who is very good at a job requiring him to extinguish every emotion dutifully. Oscar-winner Emma Thompson is feisty and heartbreaking as a housekeeper, Mr. Stevens' work wife. Mr. Stevens never reveals his feelings for her, her heart's only desire. Dammit, man, tell her!
Remains of the Day is based on Nobel Prize-winning Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, a richly detailed snapshot of history and class that Ivory brings back to life. This movie is about the pain of unrequited love, but it's also about how fascism feeds on naive, sentimental old fools. Tragedy visits those upstairs and downstairs.
The book is wonderous.
What’s crazy is that these two also played romantic leads opposite one another in “Sense and Sensibility”!