A Room with a View (1986)

James Ivory's 1985 adaptation of the Forster novel arrives with three Academy Awards, a perfect rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the smugness of a film that has never once needed to apologize. It is 1907. Lucy Honeychurch, played by an eighteen-year-old Helena Bonham Carter, travels to Florence with her cousin Charlotte, a chaperone of such exquisite repression that Maggie Smith plays her as though the role were a corset. The rooms lack views. The Emersons, father and son, offer theirs. That is the plot, more or less, and it is enough.

The social consciousness on display is real but ancestral. Lucy rejects Cecil Vyse, a man who reads aloud from a bad novel and requests permission before kissing her, in favor of George Emerson, who kisses her in a poppy field and asks nothing at all. The film's argument is that a woman should be allowed to choose her own future, and that inherited privilege is a bore. This is a critique of snobbery, not of money. The servants exist to carry the luggage. Everyone on screen is white, aristocratic, and fluent in the correct fork.

Where the ledger runs dry is everywhere else. There is no racial awareness, no ecological anxiety, no engagement with bodies that fail the era's aesthetic, no clinical vocabulary for the mind. The skinny-dipping at the Sacred Lake is a lark, not a manifesto. The historical record goes unchallenged, and the sermon, such as it is, arrives through character and incident instead of a lectern. This is a lovely, immaculately upholstered romance with a mild progressive streak that would have read as forward-thinking in 1908 and reads as a pleasant afternoon in 1986. A triumph of craft. A monument to a very narrow world. I classify it, without pleasure, as a period piece with a conscience of limited jurisdiction.