Admirably Perfect And Impossible To Love

When Mastery Creates a Yawn.

- J.Madison Davis

On a sultry and tinto-infused afternoon in Spain some years ago, a group of mystery writers from several nations were gossiping about editors and agents, contracts and jacket covers, and, of course, where to go for dinner. Our conversation drifted to the latest movies. Several writers vented their distaste for an adaptation of a novel by a writer we all particularly loathed, and having chopped it apart frame by frame, moved on to a prestige production, a Merchant and Ivory–like film (if not an actual Merchant and Ivory production) based upon a Forster-like novel featuring veddy, veddy English characters and their repressed passions. There had been a several years’ vogue in this sort of film and public television series, and each similar production elicited respectful treatment by critics. These dramas were the kind of productions that receive award nominations, but not so many awards, and speaking against them immediately identifies you as a philistine.

One of our group, an eminent British novelist, had seen the latest of these productions and was asked her opinion. “Well,” she said, “one cannot find a flaw in it. The acting is extraordinary, the costuming is totally authentic, and the cinematography is delicious. On the whole it is a nearly perfect film, and utterly, utterly boring.” Typography should have a way to represent her elongation of the word “boring” to emphasize her reaction to the film’s relentless and unendurable high culture. But having seen the film, I understood exactly what she had meant. For all there was to admire, there was not much to love. Every element of the film was in the right place and executed well, and yet the whole was so unmemorable that I am no longer certain which film it was.