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Aug. 11, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:24
1973 Freedomain Radio Movie Roundtable: A Room With A View

Listeners discuss the Merchant/Ivory adaptation of EM Forster's famous novel.

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This is a review or discussion of the movie adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel called Room of the View.
I think first written in 1908.
This movie came out in 1986.
This is the Free Domain Radio Movie Club discussion on the 11th of August 2011.
I hope you enjoy it. So what did you think?
I finally... The opera music was back in.
You back? The soundtrack.
Very good. The soundtrack is great.
Yeah, the soundtrack is great. It's not my kind of movie.
Not the one I'd pick first.
So I had a hard time getting into it at first.
And then, like, by the time they got to...
By the time I started to feel like it was into it, it was like 10 minutes from the end.
Whoa. And it was like, okay, well, cool.
And then it ended.
I'm like, oh. Huh.
There were two things that really frustrated me about it.
One is, because unfortunately I had read the book a while ago, so two things that frustrated me were that the movie seemed to flatten the characters out.
Like they seemed a lot more...
They were a lot more colorful in the book.
the word that kept coming to mind was caricature.
And the other thing was, oh, I missed all of George's soliloquies on fate.
You missed them? What do you mean?
Well, he goes on at length in the book.
But in the movie, they don't have time for that, of course.
You've got little snippets here and there, but not like the full package.
So George comes off as a kind of square-jawed hero in the movie, whereas in the book, he has more of an arc in the book, I think.
Yes. So...
That was my initial impression.
It kind of...
It flattened out the book.
Right. Sorry, anybody else has something they want to add?
Well, did anyone get the feeling that the people actually cared for each other in any of the scenes?
I thought the mom was pretty nice in a lot of ways.
Lucy's mom. I thought she was quite affectionate and wasn't quite straightforward enough, I think, to really help her daughter with this disastrous marriage she was facing.
But yeah, I thought she was fairly affectionate.
I only saw two scenes of affection between people that I really believed, and that was between the mom and Lucy when she was...
I forget exactly what she was doing, but she gave her a kiss, and that seemed...
I go, oh, well, I guess they really do like each other.
And when the second part, or the second one was when George was concerned about his father lifting up heavy things when they were moving, and he...
And I think that he gave him a kiss, too.
And that was the only two parts that I thought that were really, oh, look, those people actually care for each other.
Right, right, right.
I'll make sort of the case as to why I liked the film and then see if it makes any sense to anyone.
The book was written in 1908 and in fact it was sort of the late 19th century that E.M. Foster did his tour of Italy where he first came up with the idea for the book.
And to me what I found very moving about this film was there was a kind of gentleness to The entire world that was before the First World War, that this was a snapshot of a culture that had been largely at peace for almost a century by this point.
And I thought that was really fascinating.
I found it quite moving at the time to see the film and to see what life was like sort of in late Edwardian England and the concerns that they had.
And this is considered to be one of the top 100 novels in the English world.
And I thought it was quite a beautiful snapshot of where the culture was and what the concerns were around the true self versus false self.
And I see that going throughout the movie.
I mean, the people who have some sort of curiosity and some sort of inward view, and then the people who are blind and narcissistic and very...
More primitive psycho class like the Cecils and his mom and to some degree Charlotte Bartlett.
And also showing the transition, right?
So Charlotte, who was the sort of whiny, self-deprecating, exhausting spinster, was somebody who came out of the decision to reject her passions for the sake of social convention and how that exhausts and debilitates and enervates somebody's soul.
And so I really thought it was just fascinating.
And also, I quite appreciated the atheism at the beginning of the film when Mr.
Emerson says, you know, well, my son, I think the quote is something like, how could he be different than who he is when I have raised him free of superstition of the love of God that leads men to hate each other or something like that.
Now, in the book, he's much more socialistic.
They really scrub that right out of the movie.
But just taking it where it is, that in the movie, he's openly mocking the parson.
Now, the parson is another, the one in, I can't remember his name, not the Reverend Beeb, but the guy in Italy who makes the joke about the yellow dog.
He's very... Stifled and empty and all of that sort of stuff.
And I thought that it was really fascinating to see the war between the false self and the true self that was going on in this time before there was a war, before the Western civilization attempted its first of many suicide attempts in the 20th century.
And I thought it was really fascinating to see where society was poised before this war blew away almost all the progress of the 19th century.
That there was growing atheism, that there was growing psychological sophistication, that there was growing rights of women, right?
Because this was apparently quite a typical portrait of the young women of the time who were torn between a sort of conventional life following their mothers into marital obscurity and then a more active life of labor and self-actualization and genuine love.
Because she talks near the end of wanting to go into town and maybe get a job and that sort of stuff.
And I think it was really quite fascinating to see where society was.
Are we going to go with superstition or are we going to go with science and rationalism?
And the two younger kids, Freddie, of course, is into bones, which is evolution and all of that, and they show no interest in religion.
In fact, I think when they go to church...
The younger people all stay home when they're trying to figure out what sort of money to put in the collection plate and all that.
The younger people stay home from church, and Mr.
Beeb seems about as far from what I would consider a religious figure as you could imagine.
And the only mistake that I thought it made in terms of that was that, like a lot of A rejection of social norms, it has a very soft spot to primitivism, right?
So, George in Italy is drawn to the sort of old, sort of the black-clad old Italian women and so on, and that is not exactly the opposite of the superstition that his father has raised him to be free of.
And so there's this idea, and of course the scene, which I thought was quite a lot of fun, of them running around The pool is, of course, very primitive, but it's very spontaneous and very childlike and very fun.
And I really liked that aspect of things.
And then, of course, you see the false selves who are just shocked and horrified by all of this.
And so I really liked and found it really interesting to see that snapshot of the world when it faced a huge choice between moving forward and falling backwards.
And, of course, as we all know, it fell backward off a complete chasm into, you know, a 10 million dead pyre.
But... Boy, it just seemed like there was a lot of opportunity in that world for real progress and real growth, and I found that quite moving.
Anyway, that's my sort of brief hymn to the film, if that makes any sense.
Did you notice that no one actually was shown working except for the servants?
Yes, that's true.
I mean, although there were some people, I mean, George worked, the young blonde man, he worked.
And there were other people who were working.
But yeah, for sure. I mean, this was a film about the leisured classes, for sure.
And like those Jane Austen novels, the servants are always in the background, you know, making change and making firewood and driving the carriages.
And I think that's alluded to in, I thought, a pretty funny line that George's father had in Italy.
When the priest says, the workers were motivated by faith and by the love of God.
And he says, well, all that means is that they just weren't paid properly.
That was actually probably quite true.
There's still little bits of that sort of working class consciousness that comes in.
Yeah, I like the character of George's dad.
He had like a Thoreau.
He wanted the picture of Thoreau left with him when they were moving because he needed Thoreau with him.
And that they liked the outdoors.
And he said, the spirit is, or the birds are chirping in my heart.
The blue sky is in my heart.
That's where it needs to be.
Right. And the people who have, to me, it's been...
Like, the room with the view is this pretty obvious metaphor, right?
So, the room with the view is the people who can see outside their own personalities and who aren't manipulators.
I mean, the one thing that I got off the Cecil character, and Lucy, of course, it means light, and Cecil actually means blindness and sort of the origins of the language, is that he's constantly only concerned about the effect that he's having on others or their perception of him.
He's sort of an ultimate second-hander in the Randian sense.
And... So just constantly not being interested in the world or in other people in and of themselves, but only as they view him and constantly manipulating their perceptions of him.
And I thought that was really well done.
And I thought the acting job that the actor did was just Daniel Day-Lewis played that guy.
I thought he did a fantastic, fantastic job.
I must have seen the film like half a dozen times by now.
I sort of get new details.
In the acting and in the relationships every time.
It's a sort of well-crafted film in that way.
But the idea that there are people who can see out into the world and therefore see each other and there are other people to whom others are just a way of propping up their own fragile egos, I thought was really well explored in the film.
Yeah, I can definitely appreciate your perspective on it.
And it might be that if I go back and watch it, I might appreciate it some more.
Well, tell me what you didn't like about it or what didn't grip you with it.
Because that's, I mean, it could just be a British thing.
God knows it might be. But yeah, tell me what didn't interest you about it.
Because it's good to know for other films that we might want to get to talk about.
Sure. Well, I mean, it doesn't help that I was distracted.
Work has just been crazy.
And also, I couldn't really relax into it, if that makes sense.
But I also had a hard time following people talking.
I'm really, really not good with accents that I don't recognize.
So if there's anything that's too far off from, I guess, standard American or people that I'm used to listening to, it's just hard for me to follow in that way.
So I finally got following and I was able to actually care about the character some, it was really late into the movie for me.
So if that makes sense.
So if there's a movie like that, that you know it's kind of like that, then it just might help that I sort of take a couple of viewings to sort of get into it so I can get into it.
Or we'll get you on with subtitles.
Or subtitles, yes.
Yes, that'll help. Sure.
English. It's not actually English.
I don't speak English. I speak American, right?
Right, right, right. No, and it's completely and totally British.
I mean, you can't get more British than this kind of film.
So there's no question it's a foreign film for the colonies.
Yeah, there is that too.
I would say hands down the most frustrating character in the movie is Charlotte.
Um, because throughout, throughout the, throughout the movie, she's manipulating, um, Helena Bonham Carter's character, I can't think of her name.
Lucy. Lucy, that's right.
Throughout the movie, she's manipulating Lucy, but...
I'm sorry, you said throughout the movie she's manipulating Lucy?
Who is it? Yeah, Charlotte.
Oh, Charlotte. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, for sure. Oh, she's exhausting.
She's absolutely exhausting. She's constantly manipulating her, but sometimes manipulating her with the intent of driving her toward George, and sometimes the intent of manipulating her, driving her away from George, and it's like...
It's hard to get a real sense of...
Like, why...
I mean, I understand as a plot device why you'd need her to do that, but what would be...
It didn't make sense to me why that character would do that, flip-flop like that.
Okay, did anyone else want to take a stab at that?
I had one thought, which was that...
I mean, I just watched the movie, so I didn't read the book.
So early on, Charlotte was not really into...
Lucy being with George.
But later on in the movie, she was.
And it seemed like the same thing happened for Lucy.
Like early on in the movie, she wasn't really into George.
And then later on, she was.
And I remember at one point, Lucy's mother saying to her, you're just like Charlotte, or you're becoming just like Charlotte.
So that's one thought I had.
I don't know what kind of a plot device that would be, but some sort of a connection between Charlotte's behavior and...
And Lucy's behavior.
Yeah, I think for sure the Charlotte character is somebody who had a passionate affair or the potential for a passionate affair when she was younger.
And she had rejected it.
She had done what Lucy was doing, which is basically run away from the man and all that kind of stuff.
So she had that Possibility that Lucy was hovering on the edge of taking or rejecting the possibility of risking everything for love.
I mean, it was a big deal for an upper-class woman to reject a match with another aristocrat for the sake of a man who works on the railways.
I mean, that's crazy talk, right?
And a free thinker, and I mean, just a mess, right?
And so, it was a Big risk that she was taking and she was going to face a lot of problems from it.
And so Charlotte had decided to reject love and then became this sort of peevish fingernails on a blackbird kind of screechy matron.
And I think it was her...
She acted out of fear for herself and then rejected love.
And then she was sending Lucy down that same road until...
The bluntness of Mr.
Emerson and obviously her own conscience allowed her to help somebody to not make the mistake that she had made.
And that's a very bittersweet thing.
I mean, I think we've all, probably we've all faced that at some point in life where somebody asks for our advice and we tell them not to do something stupid that cost us dearly.
And that's a bittersweet thing.
I wish I had made a different choice.
I wish that someone had been around to tell me.
Just all that kind of stuff. So I thought it was quite a powerful thing that Charlotte did in the end, which is to help somebody get what she had rejected and which had cost her happiness in life.
No, I get that.
I just don't understand why...
It wasn't...
I mean, it wasn't explained why Charlotte's character, why the character of Charlotte had the change of heart in the first place.
Like, how...
I mean, what was in it for her besides...
I mean, because up until that point, it was all about, as you say, it was all about making sure that all the appearances were correct.
So... And even afterward, like everything she did afterward, the conversation with George's dad and all of that was sort of like behind closed doors where nobody could see it.
And she's still really concerned about that.
So it doesn't make sense why that would matter to her anymore.
You mean why she would encourage George's dad?
Lucy to go to be with George?
Yeah. Yeah, it's a good point.
I'm not sure if anybody remembers the transition point as to...
Because she stayed with...
Okay, so obviously she felt guilty about telling Eleanor Lavish about the scene.
Yeah. Right? So she felt bad about that.
And I think she actually heard George's speech...
You know, because he's George, the silent doer.
You know, he doesn't really, he has like 12 lines in the whole film, right?
I'm sure the actor was like, hey, I've got a starring role in an AM4. Oh, George, damn!
Damn! Right, because I remember as an actor, the first thing you do when you go through the script is, you know, you're shallow and cheap and you look for your own lines and all that.
But she actually was in the room, because Lucy says to Charlotte, stay, stay in the room.
And then George gives, you know, a pretty damn magnificent speech on about love and passion and all that and it's interesting because when he tries to leave or when Lucy commands him to leave Charlotte actually blocks him from leaving and that's the first time that she seems at all positive towards him but that's after she's heard him unpack his heart and declare his love and his passion and his dedication and so on And that,
I thought, was... I think that was the transition point, because before, she just saw him go to kiss her, right?
And so what she assumed, like in Italy, so I'm sure what she assumed was, well, he just wants to get in her incredibly over-lined panties.
And, you know, to sort of hack his way through that wedding cake outfit she had.
Yeah, get lost in them.
Get to the utterly distant short and curlies beneath, but...
But so, she didn't know that he loved her.
She thought he was just a player.
But then when she hears his declaration of love, she does seem to have a change of heart.
And of course, she may have only experienced the player aspect and not the love aspect when she was younger, but I think that's when she changes.
Yeah, I think that makes sense.
I also appreciated the fact that George's speech wasn't eloquent.
It was really awkward.
Everything he sees, he sounds retarded.
It's all keeping the case I've experienced with him, you know?
His view is from the inside and he's like he's using some human to monkey and monkey to human translator buried deep down in his hairless chest or something.
I think that worked perfectly because I mean at least my experience is that genuine honesty isn't Often very clean and smooth and windblown,
if that makes any sense. Yeah, no, I mean, every writer wants to give these passionate speeches, but yeah, George is like, I don't know, he's like some UFO is using him to explore humanity through stilted speech.
But yeah, I kind of appreciated that, because I think when there's genuine passion, it's very hard.
And there's danger in passion, right?
I mean, I thought that was honestly explored in Italy when, you know, Italy is beautiful and everyone is a shampoo model and all of that.
But then, of course, you know, they just kick each other to death in front of a fountain, right?
So there is that dark side.
And I think that comes out of...
I mean, one of the things that's in the book that's not in the movie is that the Emersons are big fans of Nietzsche.
And so his Apollonian-Dionysian difference is, I think, well explored.
So Italy is not idealized as the sort of perfect place where you just fall in love and live happily ever after because the dark side of that kind of passion is important.
That is a dangerous world to be passionate.
That was another thing that I was really frustrated by was the murder scene in the book just...
Like, washed over me.
It was intense.
It was like dissociating reading it.
But in the movie, it's just sort of like swooning women and flying fists and, you know, it's all over.
And you don't really get Forster's real...
I mean, you don't get his writing in that scene.
Right. And I think that...
That level of brutality that's in the book would have, I think, not sat particularly well in what, in some ways, was sort of a comedy of manners.
Yeah, I agree with you.
Actually, I was thinking that...
You can't put a Transformer in a Jane Austen novel.
But I was thinking that, too, that scene where they all converge on the house and she still...
She's still engaged to Cecil, but where everybody knows everything but nobody's telling anybody, that would have been a perfect scene for a comedy.
Yeah, that's right.
And certainly Oscar Wilde or something would probably have done something more with that.
Instead you get a sort of butt-clenching comedy about somebody getting changed for the cab driver.
And yeah, that stuff is exhausting.
But yeah, we've all known people like that, or at least I think most of us have.
So yeah, I think that sort of rang true.
I was going to mention something else.
Oh, I mean, of course, I saw this when it first came out, which is 25 years ago.
And I, of course, grew up without a dad, and I really liked the affection and love and value that the father and the son had for each other.
Although, it's not clear in the movie why the father gets progressively discombobulated throughout the movie.
Like, he gets sort of Denholm Elliott gets more distracted and more sort of...
I thought he was getting depressed because his son was not happy.
Yeah, that's probably it.
Yeah, and I really liked the closeness that they had.
I thought that was a very...
That's not something that I see a lot of.
In particular, the fact that they were philosophical, that they were literary, that they were atheists, and And so on.
And that atheism was concerned with truth.
It was concerned with morality.
I love that scene where he's climbing a tree and screaming out his creed while the vicar is slowly stirring sugar into his drab tea.
I thought that was great.
So to me it was really passionate and loving atheism, which I hadn't seen anything of in a movie back in the mid-80s.
You know, atheists said a lot of, you know, whatever you'd see them, they'd be sort of bitter and, you know, or just raving Marxists or something like that.
And so I quite, I did quite appreciate that.
And of course, Ian Foster was gay, right?
And homosexuality and atheism has something to do with each other.
That's what Bronski Beat taught me, the gay 80s disco band, because in their first album, They did that old Broadway song, It Ain't Necessarily So.
And of course, since Christianity and a lot of religions, of course, are quite anti-homosexual, if you're gay, it's not that much of a further step towards atheism, and unfortunately towards socialism as well.
So anyway, I thought that that was quite beautifully done, that relationship, which I really hadn't seen before.
So that sort of father-son thing, along with the Sort of passionate and positive atheism.
And the degree to which it could heal, heal things, heal the heart, and genuinely allow people to express themselves.
Because the people who were into social convention or religious convention were largely unexpressed.
You know, the Reverend Beeb, who's probably one of the most sympathetic priests I've ever seen portrayed, and I thought it was actually quite a lovely acting job, Barely says anything of importance.
At one point he says to Lucy after she announces her break off of the engagement, he says, yeah, I'm sure you're doing the right thing.
But then he goes off to say something else and doesn't actually pause and ask.
And there is that level of little drips of true communication in the movie that then just sort of get brushed aside for social convention.
But yeah, I thought it was quite a tender portrayal of atheism and the potentials of fatherhood.
That same thing happened when he picks up the bone in the office, too, and says, Freddy's got a lot of promise.
And the other guy says, you think so?
And he says, oh, yes.
And then it just kind of goes away.
Right. Or when Cecil says, she has accepted me.
And the bicker is like, oh, no.
You know, like little leaf crushed under indifferent sociopathic ferns.
And then it's like, oh, you should have stopped me.
He just immediately brushes over his sort of shock, and everything's about smoothing things over.
And there do seem to be those characters, and that's when I watched it again over the last two nights, I was more frustrated by that than I've been in the past.
And this seems to be something I'm seeing sort of more of, right?
So there are the true selves, and then there are the false selves.
And then there are these intermediaries, right?
So these people who...
Mediate between the two and attempt to smooth the waters between the two and may sort of swing from one side to the other a little bit, but mostly are ballast, trying to keep things in peace, right?
So at one point, the reverend sort of says he's got some hesitations about it, but doesn't really raise it too much.
And then the mom, Lucy's mom, has some reservations, but doesn't actually say, listen, you can't marry this guy.
He's a monster and that sort of stuff.
I really sort of saw that very clearly that there are these two poles, right?
So, you know, new psycho class interested in authenticity and science and truth and reason and all that.
You know, old school primitive psycho class and then these people in the middle who just try and manage these two different poles.
Yeah, in IFS parlance, the managers, right?
Yes, yeah, I really saw that quite a lot.
I do think, though, that in the movie, George lost a little bit of his...
He did lose a little bit of his true self the way that he was constructed for film.
The character just came off as...
I don't know.
I think the same thing is true of Lucy, too, though.
Where they're kind of polished up a little for the screen, right?
Yeah, I mean, hair extensions and chiseled chins and all that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, and the loss of any significant depth.
Like you said, they didn't even mention the fact that they included the line about Byron, but they didn't mention the fact that the two of them were into Nietzsche and You don't get to hear any of the conversations between, like really get to hear any of the conversations between George and Lucy either.
The scene by the waterfront after the murder to me seemed really kind of hollow and George's passion just seemed more like a come on.
At that point, to me anyways.
Compared to the book anyways.
Yeah, no, I see that scene did seem sort of stilted to me and I didn't get a sense of the, I mean, the visible shock of just witnessing a murder would be, I think, a little bit stronger than it seemed.
But again, I think that they're looking for a more middle-of-the-road audience, which is why there's only one or two lines in there about atheism and why there's no socialism and why The murder scene is muted quite a bit.
Again, they're just looking for, I think, a wider marketability.
That would be my guess. Again, what do I know?
I didn't make the film, but that would be my guess.
No, I think that makes sense.
But yeah, just imagine if they'd won.
Imagine if the Emersons and those like them had won.
Because you just know that someone like Cecil would have been a complete warmonger, I think.
And other people like him.
And the vicar in, or the priest in Italy would have been just along the same lines of duty to the realm and all that kind of stuff.
So to me, I could even see the people who would have just gone full tilt boogie into World War I and those other people who would have been much more sorrowful and hesitant about it.
Yeah. Yeah. And from here, we just discussed other films we might want to see again in the future.
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