I was reading one of my habitual blogs (blogs I check daily, of which there are about four), and came across a link to a review (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2010/11/six_views_of_ne.shtml) with the following paragraph:
Of course, it's bad form to review a movie that might have been, but I can't help wishingNever Let Me Go were more carefully and deliberately a deconstruction of the sort of film associated most prominently with the Merchant Ivory production company. I don't know why this is, exactly—why I feel such antipathy toward such films as Howard's End and The Bostonians, among many others: films of quality that know themselves as films of quality, that fill their frames with the decor of quality, that garb their actors in the costumes of quality, that illuminate each scene with the light of quality (and not just Merchant Ivory films, either, for quality spreads, like a kudzu clone, to such twaddle as Atonement). Perhaps my aversion originates with an earlier Ishiguro adaptation, the Merchant Ivory productionRemains of the Day, which didn't merely narrow the source material, as Never Let Me Go has done, but mangled it, rendering its meanings into nonsense and sentiment.
I have three responses to this rather moronic series of assertions (albeit well written):
1) The vitriolic repetition of "quality" as an adjective of derision smacks of the sort of reverse snobbery which characterizes much of the literary criticism I abhor. It's almost exactly what I'd expect a duke or snooty servant in the recent (and judgeing by the first episode, excellent) ITV series Downton Abbey to say of a hard working member of the working or middle classes. And yet, because it's directed at just this sort of person - the kind that sees value in inherited traditions and order, in cleanness and structure - it's perfectly fine. Certainly, traditions, inheritance, order, cleanness, and structure are often found cheek by jowl with exploitation, racism, nepotism, corruption, and other vile sins - but they are not transmuted versions of the same thing, just as hard working is not a transmutation of dirty, even though they are often found in conjunction.
2) The Remains of the Day, as adapted by Merchant-Ivory productions, is indeed a lesser work than the novel. I find the adherence to screenwriting cliches, such as giving the protagonists' father misogyny and distance issues, annoying - and yet, the spare, cold style of filming matches Ishiguro's cold, spare prose style quite well. The criticism here is completely out of proportion to the misdemeanors of the adaptation, which only commits the common folly of being a perfectly competent, lovely to look at adaptation of a greater novel.
3) The cut against Atonement is perhaps more justified, and yet seems even more thoughtless. Though I find the film emotionally immature, disparaging the technical accomplishments of the film's visuals because they are an evolution of the "heritage" or "quality" film is akin to disparaging an author merely because they attempt at a distinctive style. The attempt may end pretentiously - but that does not make the attempt itself unworthy, as the article contends.
All in all, I'd like to give a hearty "Badly done" to the reviewer. One can be disapproving (and from what I hear, the film may deserve such disapprobation) of a member of a genre or style without making tastelessly offensive comments about the catagory itself. Surely a reviewer for a science fiction site should know that better than most.
As a final note, I will say that I react so violently against this paragraph not merely because I found the films mentioned above (I've not yet seen Never Let Me Go) visually gorgeous, but also because this attitude tends to be the same as those who condemn the writing and adaptation of Jane Austen as trivial, relicts of a past which is happily dead, or just plain boring. And that is an attitude I cannot but abhor with every fibre of my anglophilic (and orthographically silly) being.
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