A Great World War II Movie

... With All The Violence Minus The Gunfire

This is the greatest World War II movie I have seen. The violence perpetrated is fundamental. It is a great work of art and Anthony Hopkins (who I remember from The Silence of the Lambs) and Emma Thompson have given intense performances, studied and emotionally rich.

Mr. Stevens (Hopkins) remains a slave to his final days, long after the war is over, the world has changed, he has a new, much more egalitarian “master,” the government has changed, and he drives cross-country to meet Ms. Kenton (Thompson), now Mrs. (Whoever), long married to someone else. Kenton’s feelings for Stevens are as strong as ever. She writes to him saying the years she spent with him were her best and also says as much as “It feels like I wasted my life.” It is not true Stevens does not have feelings for her. He always has had it, as repressed as they might be; they show every step of the way to the very last good-bye when Kenton finally gets on to the bus and bursts open into tears, not being able to get her eyes off the love of her life.

The final scene sums it all. The butler Stevens’ new master and Stevens find a pigeon has entered through the chimney the room they are in. The pigeon attempts to fly away but is entrapped. Finally it makes it out the window and the master (Christopher Reeves), a former U.S. Congressman now living in England, helps it do so. After the pigeon flies away, Stevens shuts the window close, and remains behind. That is the story of Stevens' life, to shut the window and remain behind. The new master tries to help out Stevens the way it helped out the pigeon but Stevens is much too stubborn in his slavery.

And one wonders if the British did not hurt themselves more than any other peoples with their relentless episodes of colonizations.

Most of the movie is shot within that one household where Stevens is oh so perfect a butler. He can not so much as express the love he does feel for the woman Ms. Kenton as he tirelessly refers to as. Heck, he can not even express his emotions when his father passes away. He urges the doctor to go for this stupid statesman of a Frenchman who is all too consumed by the blisters on his feet when he ought to be worried about the impending war that was to engulf the entire continent. Stevens does such a thorough job of depriving himself of all humanity that one sees the concentration camps in his heart. He is dead, maybe not so clinically, but for all human purposes he is dead.

And then there are strong statements on the classism in Britain and the racism and anti-Semitism that Hitler personified in his utterly insecure but brilliant personality.

There is this scene where one of Lord Darlington’s (his master) pillories him with one ridiculous question after another about the “currency crisis,” the “gold standard,” the “situation in north Africa” to prove that Stevens and millions like him in Britain have no business in the affairs of the state, a not too subtle attack on the idea that every person has a right to vote and thus has a say in government. This is classism. This is British internal violence.

And there is anti-semitism.

The History Channel’s fascination with Hitler today symbolizes the west’s continuing fascination with Hitler. Does the channel have anything else to show, I often wonder? What disturbs me there is a not too subtle attempt to show Hitler as this evil genius that did it all, the Satan come alive. The weakness in that line of argument is that lets the others escape guilt, people like Lord Darlington to whom Stevens is so blindly devoted.

Hitler did not create anti-semitism; he cashed on it, though it must be pointed out he took it to forms that could not have been imagined without the war and state machines he created.

Lord Darlington is shown reading anti-semitic literature. Subsequently he gets his two Jewish maidservants fired. The two girls, it is known, will be sent back to Germany. We never hear of them again. Well, we never again hear of many Jews from that time period.

I wonder if homophobia would be a contemporary example along those lines.

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