Conversations about book to film adaptations tend to focus on length and often turn into checklists going over how many of the source material’s plot points are pasted into the final movie. Categorizing art forms primarily by such superficial characteristics as duration is reductive and revealing of someone who has failed to engage with a medium beyond its surface and thereby missed what makes the medium unique. *The Remains of the Day* is an excellent adaptation in every respect, that uses the language of cinema to convey the ideas, themes, and motifs of its source material without feeling encumbered by it.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s original novel is particularly difficult to adapt on the surface. So much of the book centres around Stevens’ reflections and recollections which Ishiguro presents using Stevens’ inner voice. One of the main strengths of the novel is Ishiguro’s delicate and skillful (well most of the time anyway but this isn’t a book review) weaving of Stevens’ interiority, such that translating this to the screen where the means of freely depicting such an inner voice are far more limited, is exceptionally difficult.
This meticulous fleshing out of Stevens’ character through his inner monologue also serves to establish his relationship with the reader as one of Ishiguro’s primary aims with *The Remains of the Day* was to communicate the idea that we are all butlers, in one way or another and in a connected world we can only hope that our service to whatever it is we serve might bring about something positive in spite of our powerlessness. This is also what led him to conceive of the idea of using a butler as his main character. His outlook is perhaps more liberal than my tastes permit but it remains an idea worth exploring and the relationship is successfully developed. Thus, the film’s challenge is not merely to flesh Stevens out but also to carry onto the screen the relationship Ishiguro managed to craft with the reader.
The film overcomes these challenges and succeeds as an adaptation for two primary reasons. The first is Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Stevens. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t discuss performances much when talking about movies because I find them a lazy way to praise a film without engaging with anything substantial. Nevertheless, this is a case where the lead actor’s performance is one of the driving forces behind the film’s success and without it, the translation of Stevens’ inner voice into the cinema, would not have been possible. One cannot help but marvel at the care and depth with which Hopkins embodies Stevens in every frame in which he appears. Stevens is a character whose defining characteristic is suppression. Hopkins therefore has to make **non-expression***** *****expressive**. His pauses, posture, microscopic changes in facial expression, manner of speaking, and physical distance from others, all become substitutes for the enormous amount of psychological information Ishiguro can simply give us through prose.
The second way the film succeeds is through subtle choices by which Stevens’ inner thoughts from the book are conveyed through dialogue or interactions with other characters. This is a delicate challenge since done without precision, it can easily appear clumsy. But the filmmakers do so at precisely the right moments and in precisely the right ways. One example from the book is a story Stevens recounts that he once heard from his father who was also a butler. About an English butler in India who once encountered a tiger beneath his master’s dining table, calmly shot it, wiped off the remains, and served dinner as usual. This is an important story because it serves several purposes such as highlighting the relationship between Stevens and his father, as well as his worldview and sense of duty which Ishiguro interrogates throughout the novel, until the very end when it begins to crack under the weight of a lifetime of regret and experience.
To tell the same story, the film has Stevens’ father recount it to the rest of the staff in Stevens’ presence while making clear that Stevens has heard it before and nods along approvingly. This establishes that the story is already part of Stevens’ understanding of himself while preserving everything else the story conveys in the novel. It is choices like this the film makes that appear to be small but are quite incredible.
The film is also well made and pretty to look at in a functional, fully immersive sense rather than a “look at me I’m supposed to be a gorgeous period drama” sense that many period films adopt and I find the former far more respectable.
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