American Friends

Remembering watching American Friends, this is the first time I see Michael Palin at a more serious role. I completely enjoy watching this film. Palin plays an Oxford professor who falls for an American woman (Connie Booth) and her daughter (Trini Alvarado). A wonderful acted film and the scenery is breathtaking to watch. Well worth the effort to see.

It's 1861 Rev Francis Ashby (Michael Palin) is a senior Oxford teacher holidaying alone in the Alps. He meets the American family Hartleys. Young Elinor (Trini Alvarado) is especially taken with Mr Ashby. None of the teachers are allowed to marry. When Elinor and Caroline Hartley surprise him arriving at Oxford, they aren't even allowed to stay on the College grounds. Oliver Syme (Alfred Molina) is a scheming new-thinker, and becomes a challenger to the morally unblemished Ashby for the post of College President.

Michael Palin wrote the story, and probably has taken great personal stakes in this movie. It seems that much effort has been put into maintaining the authenticity in the relationship between the sexes. The monastic feel of college life can be a very trying watch. It's very stale and not very exciting. Even a great debate sound dry and uninteresting.

The woman's touch allows the movie to gain a bit of color. Michael Palin is painfully reserved. There is an intense love story amidst the sexual repression to be had, but the pacing is so slow that it never gains the energy to lift off. Palin and Alvarado need more time together. The movie gains some altitude when they are hiding in his room. However the emphasis keeps being pushed to the developing scandal rather than the developing romance. Instead of a love story, it's a story of propriety.

Michael Palin shows that he has grown beyond his Monty Python days, but he has not left them far behind. His droll portrayal of an Oxford fellow, one who must avoid marriage at all costs, is sheer delight. He meets and cannot avoid falling in love with an American woman, but it is the depth and sincerity of his love that surprises him and us. The cinematography is stunning in Switzerland, and all dark days and wooden paneling in Oxford, in both cases conveying a metaphor for Palin's interior struggle. Wonderful and gentle.

Rev Francis Ashby is a bookish and retiring don at Oxford who reluctantly gives in to his colleagues insistences that he go for a holiday. Enjoying the peace and quiet in the Alps he is initially disturbed by the arrival of a group including an American woman (Caroline) and her teenager ward (Elinor). However, acting as their guide when the rest of the group returns to the lodgings, Ashby starts to fall for the darling Elinor but, after slight bonding, he is called back immediately due to the failing health of the college president. When his American friends come to Oxford to visit, their arrival throws the college into a tizzy and he finds himself in competition with others for not only the role of president but also for the hearts of his friends.

Watching this film for the third time since its release in the early nineties I decided to review it and, looking at the title page was astonished (yes, really) to see that only 106 people have voted on it. I know this is not a total representation of how many people have actually seen it but I was surprised how such a well-known film appears to be underseen (although it may say more about the demographics of those that use this site most). This is not to imply that it is an excellent film but it is a well paced film that is enjoyable on its own terms. For those expecting great sentiment you will be let down, likewise those expecting a Merchant Ivory film, or a very comic film but those open to a nicely sensitive little tale that is slightly comic but more enjoyable for being restraining and being very true to the Englishness of its subjects and the polite behaviour of the period.

Based on his own grandfather's diaries, Palin has done a good job as both writer and director to capture the period and deal with the subject in a way that is unshowy but not stale, sensitive and patient but never dull and comic without ever being so crude as to actually make you laugh out loud. It isn't fantastic of course but it is nicely lowkey and it is enjoyable for what it is. As actor Palin continues this good work and he delivers a very restrained and shy performance – even more amazing when you think this is a Python! Booth and Alvarado are both very attractive and restrained at the same time and effective if not memorable. Molina, currently playing a superhero baddie, plays a 'baddie' of another sort here and he pitches his character well to be dastardly while still keeping within the period. Support from Jones, Firth, Eddison and others is good and they all keep to the period and the material yet.

Overall this is not an amazing film or even a really good one, but what it is is a well written period drama that is delivered well enough to prevent it being dull and it comes over as a nice little film that is pleasing to watch even if it never sets the screen on fire. An undervalued little drama that is a well handled, very personal film from Palin who does very well in all three of his roles.

Set about one hundred years ago, in Europe and England, this tale of repressed love initially feels like a re-working of 'A Room with a View', with the list of who fell for whom slightly re-arranged. But its portrait of Victorian England seems deliberately exaggerated: a woman can't speak to a college fellow without ruining his reputation, it seems, or talk to a man after dark without being arrested as a whore. Yet there's a charm here that grows on you, in spite of its obviousness. What is perhaps a shame is the missed opportunity presented by the fact that there hero's opponent (in a college election) is an advocate of evolution, which by implication the hero opposes: but the film does not force its favourite to defend his creed. I liked odd bits of casting: Alfred Molina playing sexy, for example, and Roger Lloyd-Peck (Trigger in 'Only Fools and Horses') playing posh. But the script itself, though cute, could have done with some of the same originality.