The Remains of the day

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is lovingly brought to the screen in this lavish and finely crafted study of English class relations. Anthony Hopkins, in a stunning Academy Award nominated performance, is a butler who has been a gentleman’s gentleman: propriety and service are everything. Even his master’s sympathies for the emerging Nazi Party in Germany do not affect his work. However, on looking back at his life he decides that he was mistaken to choose his work over his emotional attachment to the only woman he has loved (Emma Thompson). Slipping back and forth from the late 1950s to the late 1930s, “Remains of the Day” is both an affecting romance and a sharp and sometimes very sad, very touching examination of how the British class system trapped people into a betrayal of their individual aspirations. It is also a study of how the emerging politics of the Cold War were to finally irrevocably alter those class relations, as America rather than Europe was to dominate as a world power. Co-starring Christopher Reeve and James Fox.