Merchant Ivory Rewrites Cultural History

The gentlemanly films of the Merchant-Ivory production team — The Europeans, The Bostonians, A Room with a View, Howards End, Maurice, The Remains of the Day, etc. — represent a now-vanished, literary multiculturalism. That means the new documentary Merchant Ivory inquires into a lost world; its title drops the hyphen because in today’s diversity-crazed culture, the Anglo-American amalgam has gone from a once-familiar label (sometimes a demeaning sobriquet) to obscure legend.

Director Stephen Soucy revives Merchant-Ivory’s reputation in defiance of the contemporary cultural fashion that rejects literature and the Western empire — Henry James and E. M. Forster being the source of Merchant and Ivory’s modus vivendi.

The first date between Bombay-born Ismail Merchant and Oregon-born James Ivory was going to see the Satyajit Ray movie Three Daughters (cut and released for the U.S. market as Two Daughters), an indication of the artsy cosmopolitan taste that would define their own films. It’s fascinating to learn that ambitious money-raiser Merchant screened the duo’s first feature, The Householder, for Ray, winning the great man’s offer to help and re-edit its narrative into a flashback framework — which neophyte director Ivory much preferred.

Soucy addresses the pair’s many “convoluted relationships” as the basis of their different projects, briefly focusing on their private sexuality, which was never publicly discussed. At age 96, surviving partner Ivory remains discreet, to the extent that Soucy barely touches upon the coming-out film Call Me by Your Name that Ivory scripted in 2017. (It was after Merchant and the team’s two most stalwart collaborators, scenarist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins had all passed.) No surprise, then, that Ivory’s understated discussion of family life — specifically with his lumber-magnate father who supplied building material for Hollywood studios — led to the bizarre patriarchal sexual confession at the end of Call Me by Your Name.

The most interesting aspect of this exceedingly tasteful doc is how it reveals culture change. So few Millennial filmmakers display literary interest of any sort that one is inclined to look back at the Merchant-Ivory output with new respect for what seemed like snobby pretentiousness when the films were first released.

Currently, most gay filmmakers resort to politicized or flamboyant camp, so Merchant Ivory reports on men of the generation that, even during the AIDS crisis, chose genteel refinement as their preference and identity. Soucy observes the team’s genuine decorum without delving into what it hid about their personalities, or what it really meant. In our Marvel Cinematic Universe era, A Room with a View, Howards End, and Remains of the Day seem less boring and less pompous than they did at the time. Yet, despite their prestige, those films all lack visual power and emotional force.

Soucy overlooks Ivory’s feeble cinematic technique (worst in The Bostonians and Slaves of New York) but pays apt attention to the later literary adaptations: Jefferson in Paris, The City of Your Final Destination and — the best of the Merchant-Ivory James dramas — The Golden Bowl.

Fact is, after all these years, the homosexual refinement and political subtleties that Merchant-Ivory evinced (Vanessa Redgrave’s proto-feminist heroine in The Bostonians, Nick Nolte and Thandie Newton’s Jefferson and Sally Hemings relationship in Jefferson in Paris way before the 1619 Project made racial power dynamics fashionable) doesn’t mean that these Masterpiece Theater–style movies were great cinema. Merchant-Ivory’s reputable work never matches the sophistication of Joseph Losey or the magnificence of Luchino Visconti.

In this sense, Merchant Ivory is another example of how contemporary historians rewrite the past. Soucy casually discloses the almost bohemian libertinism of those “convoluted relationships” (sparing us dirty details) but without finding any connection to the staid “heritage” filmmaking.

Turning Merchant Ivory into eminent Victorians rather than complexly conflicted social climbers actually distances them from us, and that’s merely for Millennial convenience.