"A Room with a View" is one of the best-known Merchant-Ivory films, the one that made their reputation for tastefully adapting Edwardian novels. Working from E. M. Forster's charming story, Merchant and Ivory add gorgeous Tuscan cinematography, lush opera music, and a cast of talented British actors. Even a skinny-dipping scene is done with enough class that the movie got away with a PG rating (though that probably wouldn't happen nowadays!). In short, Merchant-Ivory makes it look easyand this ease has led to charges of their films being dull and middlebrow, as well as to many imitators.
But this stereotype of "a Merchant-Ivory film" fails to mention just how vivid and hilarious "A Room with a View" actually is. With scene-stealing actors like Maggie Smith as a prim, passive-aggressive chaperone and Daniel Day-Lewis as a self-centered young man whose every gesture tells of his fastidious rigidity, a rich vein of humor runs through the film. The movie also delights in putting its heroine Lucy (a baby-faced Helena Bonham Carter) in situations that prove awkward, funny, and ultimately invigorating for a well-bred young lady of 1905. Lucy finds herself in a love triangle, with society telling her to choose Cecil (Day- Lewis) but a deeper force pulling her toward the unconventional, moody George Emerson (Julian Sands).
A comedy of manners, "A Room with a View" is sometimes guilty of seeing its characters as types, rather than people. Even Lucy is not much more than "the young girl transfigured by Italy" that Miss Lavish (Judi Dench), a writer of cheap novels, labels her as. Still, it's easy to get caught up in the romance of this delightful movie. After seeing it, you'll want to go out and defend Truth and Love from all those who would deny them. Or at least to start saving up for a trip to Italy.
