Genteel Lives Unsettled in Uruguay (Published 2010) (2024)

“The City of Your Final Destination” is as pure an example of the Merchant Ivory brand of upscale literary cinema as devotees of “Howards End,” “A Room With a View” and “The Remains of the Day” could ask for. But times have changed. Partly because the rarefied aesthetic climes conjured by the film barely exist anymore, its story feels as quaint as the once-vital Merchant Ivory ethos of hothouse nostalgia — with its antique-shop sensibility and Anglo-European snob appeal — does.

Ismail Merchant, the producing partner of Merchant Ivory, died in 2005, leaving the director James Ivory (now 81) to go it alone with this adaptation of Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel of the same name. Only eight years have passed since it was published, but they might as well be a lifetime given the changing cultural climate in the age of the Internet, not to mention the precarious economy.

Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing cultured, cosmopolitan residents of a remote estate in Uruguay, are among the actors who lend the film a classy imprimatur. As their characters philosophize and bicker, you bask in a refined sensibility shaped by Chekhov, Henry James and E. M. Forster, in which privileged people with time on their hands fret about money, endlessly chew over the past and allow their minds to eat themselves.

The story follows the quest of Omar Razaghi (Omar Metwally), an Iranian-born graduate student at the University of Colorado, to gain permission from the family of Jules Gund, a Latin American author who committed suicide, to write Gund’s authorized biography. Omar’s academic and financial future depends on his writing the book, and when the Gund family unexpectedly denies permission, his bossy, live-in girlfriend, Deirdre (Alexandra Maria Lara), pushes him to fly to South America to change their minds.

Omar arrives unannounced at the lavish Gund estate, presided over by Jules’s imperious widow, Caroline (Ms. Linney), and his older brother Adam (Mr. Hopkins). Also in residence are Jules’s girlfriend Arden Langdon (Ms. Gainsbourg); Arden’s young daughter, Portia (Ambar Mallman); and Pete (Hiroyuki Sanada), Adam’s much younger male Asian lover of 25 years.

Omar ends up staying at the Gunds for a period of time during which he has a tepid flirtation with Arden, wins the support of Adam — who tries to enlist him in a smuggling scheme — and pressures the intransigent Caroline to change her mind.

Adapting a novel with this many thematic strands and symbols (quicksand, for one, an apiary for another ) into a fluent film has its obvious pitfalls. The screenplay by the longtime Merchant Ivory collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala gamely tries to camouflage reams of exposition necessary for the plot to advance smoothly. But too often you hear the machinery clicking, and the narrative energy eventually dissipates. Lacking the nuggets of illumination that lend a Chekhov play its universality or the refined moral scrutiny of a James or Forster novel, “The City of Your Final Destination” feels trivial, despite its high tone and impeccable manners.

Playing the film’s thornie*st character, Ms. Linney gives by far its sharpest performance as an unhappy widow who yearns to flee South America for New York. Caroline implies that she is withholding her permission to protect all kinds of dark family secrets, some of which may be revealed in an unfinished manuscript.

Mr. Metwally’s Omar, who is continually lauded for his alluring good looks, is a scrawny, snippy young man, more avaricious than sexy, whose lack of erotic energy renders his kissing scenes with Ms. Gainsbourg (who can be explosive) uncomfortable to watch. More serious, the screenplay doesn’t bother to make a case that an authorized biography of a writer whose work is barely discussed has any special value beyond advancing Omar’s academic career.

Besides Ms. Linney’s excellent performance and Mr. Hopkins’s good one, the best things about the movie are its sensuous cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe (“Talk to Her,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and a gorgeous soundtrack. A brief excerpt from Poulenc’s Sonata for Violin and Piano distills the repressed yearnings of people trapped together in a lonely South American paradise whose center of gravity has vanished, leaving them adrift and on edge.

“The City of Your Final Destination” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual situations.

THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by James Ivory; written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on the novel by Peter Cameron; director of photography, Javier Aguirresarobe; music by Jorge Drexler; production designer, Andrew Sanders; costumes by Carol Ramsey; produced by Paul Bradley and Pierre Proner; released by Merchant Ivory. At the Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street, Manhattan. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

WITH: Anthony Hopkins (Adam Gund), Laura Linney (Caroline Gund), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Arden Langdon), Omar Metwally (Omar Razaghi), Hiroyuki Sanada (Pete), Alexandra Maria Lara (Deirdre), Norma Aleandro (Mrs. Van Euwen), Ambar Mallman (Portia), Norma Argentina (Alma) and Luciano Suardi (Doctor Pereira).