A Room with a View

Oh man, if I’m a sucker for any type of film, it’s a British costume drama about repressed emotions, all-consuming love affairs, and the disruption of the respectable order. A Room with a View feels tailored made for someone like me, and it’s a great film from start to finish.

The film, and the novel upon which it is based by E.M. Forster, tells of the love affair between Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson, who meet on a vacation in the Italian countryside. Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) is being chaperoned by her spinster cousin (Maggie Smith) on this vacation, mostly to keep an eye on the young woman as she is engaged to Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis). But the attraction between Lucy and George (Julian Sands) is titanic. Lucy and George are both outsiders of the normal customs of English culture and find in each other a kindred spirit.

George sees Lucy for the woman she truly is, or could be nurtured into being if the class system and society in which she lives didn’t demand her to be a beautiful ornamentation and nothing more. Cecil is the type of man who views her as a logical prize to be obtained in order to retain the established order of things and work through the checklist of milestones and objects to be attained in an effort to be deemed a respectable member of the upper class. George wants Lucy as a partner, as an equal in life.

A Room with a View is about Lucy’s choice between what type of life she wants – a life with no view, or a life with one. Lucy’s journey is primarily one of deep intellectual thought about what she truly wants out of life. Helena Bonham Carter, known primarily to me for playing eccentrics, is wonderfully restrained here. Julian Sands is the intense free-thinker George, and he’s impossibly attractive in this mode. It’s easy to see why Lucy would throw everything away to be with him. Daniel Day-Lewis is a laugh riot in this, playing a character so pretentious and filled with airs that he frequently looks like the caricature on The New Yorker come to life. While Maggie Smith makes a meal of playing her dotty spinster character, given the trajectory of her career it almost feels like Smith was just waiting to age into these roles where she could deliver sassy quips, blunt one-liners, and tut-tut about diminishing propriety and standards of class with exuberance.

The film does move at a more modest and measured pace, preferring to take idle strolls through various dialog passages making the more blunt mannerisms of George stand out even more as a shock of violent color in a beige world. This deliberate pace and tone makes for a story in which you must get swept up in the intricacies of a sideways glance or an arched brow to speak volumes about the emotions bubbling under the placid surface. Heart and mind join together in this film in which we must ask these characters why they’re doing what they are, and whether or not this is what they truly want.