The Remains of the Day

So I made a mistake. 

I read the book. Then I immediately watched the movie. 

Sometimes if do this backwards. I often find the book more rewarding having seen the movie first. Other times I read the book or comic long before the movie comes out. 

That distance allows me to forget the small details that often make book readers like me persnickety. 

But, even though the Remains of the Day has been on my “watch this someday list” since I saw a snippet of it on The Sopranos in the 1990s I just never got around to it. 

And then I needed a new audio book and wanted something different and then I was listening to it over the course of two weeks. 

And the movie showed up on Showtime this month and here we are. 

The book can best be described as sly. 

All of it is from the point of view of a very English butler as he looks back over his life and goes to meet a woman who used to work for him as a housemaid. 

The butler tells you about how important he took his work, how great butlers should be judged and spends time defending his master from all those scurrilous rumors that came out after the second war. 

What’s so sly and fun about it is that the butler is very clearly lying to himself, he’s so wrapped up in his role and his career that he missed so many important things. 

He missed the mistakes his employer was making, and the mistakes he was making with his father and with a woman who worked with him. 

His whole life was spent working very hard at everything that could not have mattered in the least. 

But at least the silver shined. Why even a British Prime Minister once complimented it! 

Let’s start with the best part of this. 

The cast is a dream team. It’s got Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Christopher Reeve and James Fox! Anthony Hopkins, playing a butler at the height of his powers! 

Thompson got an Oscar but the movie lost out to Unforgiven. Honestly, that’s the right choice.

The movie is probably as good as it could possibly be given the source material. That they managed a film out of a book that spends pages discussing the ins and outs of staffing plans and types of polish is impressive enough. 

What struck me and will never bother non-book readers in the least was how they had to crowbar in the Butler’s private thoughts into dialogue in the film. 

Every important thing happens under the surface in the book. These incredibly repressed English people do not express their true thoughts aloud. 

In the movie, they have to do it in dialogue at least some of the time. 

But how else to make it work? Movies are a visual medium. 

There is also at least one, possibly two instances where two characters who were separate in the book are combined into a single person. 

Which is solid screenwriting, honestly. And the movie is faithful to the point and tone of the book even if it isn’t a word for word recreation.

There is one scene near the end of the book that is cut out of the movie. That scene was apparently shot and was in the dvd extras. In the book it is a key moment. In the movie Hopkins and Thompson handle it with looks. 

Again, despite my issues the movie succeeds in all sorts of ways.

For those of you who loved Downton Abbey and all the other England between the wars dramas this is among the very best of that very specific type of thing.

The book is 5 stars. The movie is at least 4 and a half.