talktooloose

I finally got my hands on a rental copy of the recent 2-DVD release of Maurice (Criterion has been putting out all of the Merchant-Ivory films in deluxe treatment). It is an extraordinary film and one that I first saw when it came out -- just as I was coming out, in fact. And it was a great inspiration to me.

The first time I saw it, I just got from it the idea of bravery in being who you are and used it as an example for my own life. This time, I realized how much more transgressive a document it is. I very much admire how E.M. Forster in the novel and the filmmakers in the movie linked ideas of awakening to queer sexuality with blowing apart the class system and with questioning the moral and intellectual underpinnings of British society. In fact, the story blows apart the concept of intellectualizing feelings as another way to hide from yourself.

Hugh Grant, as Maurice's first love, Graham and James Wilby as Maurice go on two very different journeys starting from their meeting at Cambridge. Hugh Grant, an upper class man destined to go into politics is the first to open Maurice's heart and mind to the possibility of loving a man; but it is his very intellectualism that makes him fear what he is becoming and insist that their relationship be a platonic one. Eventually, after the arrest of Lord Risley, another homosexual upper class fellow, Grant has a nervous breakdown, "discovers" that he's straight after all, leaves Maurice, marries a proper English woman and goes into politics.

Maurice is not a thinker at the beginning. He is lost and befuddled and seems to be a man in search of an identity, even a personality. But the farther he moves towards his acceptance of his homosexuality, the more he awakens and the stronger a character he becomes. It is this awakening that allows him to shake off his upbringing -- to shake off the repressive society around him completely -- and to fall in love with the Under-Gamesman, Scudder, on Graham's estate, a man whose low social stature would never have allowed them to associate as anything but master and servant in Edwardian England.

Perhaps, more than anything, this is the aspect of the film that I value. In the process of coming to terms with my own homosexuality and developing what I now call a queer identity, I had to question so much of the society around me that the process left me forever changed. My upbringing was both supervised and kind enough that I could have followed the paths set for me by my parents, the Jewish community and society at large without much questioning of their values. Suddenly finding myself outside the "norm" in a crucial way forced me to re-evaluate my whole world. It was terrifying but ultimately the most valueable process I have ever gone through.

When Lord Risley is convicted and sentenced in court, the judge is especially harsh because the upper-class man corrupted "his social inferiors" and used his Cambridge educated mind not as an example, but to deceive "his intellectual inferiors". This charge is almost comically turned around when it is Scudder that must take all the action and be the brave one in order to bring himself and Maurice together. It is Scudder who sees the nature of Maurice's pain and loneliness and climbs through his window and into his arms saying, "Scudder's here...I heard you calling me."

What pheonomenal and brave acting! All three leads are straight and yet the passion and tenderness of the love scenes is astonishing. If you get the DVDs, check out in the deleted scenes the lovely middle-of-the-night pillow talk between Maurice and Scudder that was cut from the film. In his commentary, James Ivory says he very much regrets having left it out.

He also notes that this was one of the first films about gays where the central couple gets to ride off into happily-ever-after.