Review: Documentary looks at lives and careers of 'Room with a View' filmmakers

With 1990's "A Room with a View," 1993's "Howard's End" and 1994's "The Remains of the Day," the filmmaking team of producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory created a series of early 20th-century costume dramas that were of such high quality and definitive that they birthed a new classification for such films — "Merchant Ivory."

That's also the title of director Stephen Soucy's documentary about the duo and their film production company, which explores far more than just their '90s peak, tracing the relationship between the two men, their collaborators and their films from 1962's "The Householder" through 44 pictures until Merchant's death in 2005.

In the late '90s, I had a long interview with Ivory, an American who met Indian producer Merchant at a 1959 New York screening of one of Ivory's documentaries, on the occasion of the publishing of the book "The Films of Merchant Ivory." Largely because of that, I came into the documentary with some knowledge of the duo, who were domestic as well as production partners.

But, even with that understanding of their "storyline," the documentary delivers some small revelations:

* That Booker Prize- and Oscar-winning screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who wrote most of the scripts for Merchant-Ivory pictures, was not Indian, but a German Jew who married an Indian architect and met the duo when they made a film of her 1960 novel "The Householder."

* That Prawer Jhabvala, Merchant and Ivory, who were a couple, and composer Richard Robbins, lived together during much of their 40-plus years of filmmaking together. That Robbins and Merchant had a relationship, and that both Merchant and Ivory had affairs with other men.

* That Merchant Ivory productions survived on razor-thin margins, with Merchant often raising funds to keep the filming going and, until their '90s Hollywood productions "Jefferson in Paris" and "Surviving Picasso," operated on very low budgets, often working nearly as guerrilla filmmakers.

The latter was true from "The Householder" onward as Merchant and Ivory first created a number of films set in India, including the well-received "Shakespeare Wallah" before finding their voice with the 1979 adaptation of Henry James' "The Europeans."

It is, as the film emphasizes, also notable that Merchant and Ivory, a pair of gay men, made some of the first widely seen films that explored gay romance and issues, most notably the 1987 E.M. Forster adaptation, "Maurice." Ivory won his only Academy Award — for best adapted screenplay — for the 2017 coming-of-age gay romantic drama "Call Me by Your Name."

Soucy put together the documentary in standard movie-about-the-movies form, showing clips from many of the films, interviewing at length Ivory, gathering clips from old interviews with Merchant and Prawer Jhabvala and adding the views of a plethora of actors who worked on their films.

They include Helena Bonham Carter, Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Rupert Graves and Vanessa Redgrave, all who provide insight into the duo's working technique and the chaos that seemingly was part of all their productions.

But notably missing is Sir Anthony Hopkins, who starred in many of their biggest movies. He, after all, sued Merchant Ivory Productions for failure to pay him for 2009's "The City of Your Final Destination."

The contributions of the actors, other longtime members of the filmmaking team and some friends and acquaintances provide some depth that, combined with Ivory's recollections and the views of the partnership's movies, makes "Merchant Ivory" a very good movie about the movies that's a must-see for the duo's fans.

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Reach the writer at 402-473-7244 or kwolgamott . On Twitter

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Entertainment reporter/columnist