The “astoundingly bad” Merchant Ivory movie Roger Ebert despised: “Such a mess”
For over 40 years and more than 40 movies, Merchant Ivory was synonymous with a very specific kind of British film. The partners, producers, and their company were responsible for some classics, but one of their efforts was such a cinematic shambles that Roger Ebert was left reeling.
Even if Ismail Merchant and James Ivory weren’t directly involved, their names were still invoked as a catch-all term to describe a period-set drama, usually based on a classic novel, which would feature elaborate production design, esteemed actors playing gentrified characters, many of them unfolding in large houses or palatial estates.
Not many filmmakers are welcomed into the lexicon, but they were. Their roots ran so deep that even today, movies or TV shows that fit into several of the boxes associated with the duo are dubbed as being spiritual successors to the Merchant Ivory days of yesteryear, when glacially paced early 20th-century stories were landing on the big and small screen with what felt like never-ending regularity.
It wasn’t a strictly local operation, though, with the duo occasionally teaming up with outside parties. One such case came in 1996, when multiple production companies jumped into bed together to make The Proprietor, which Merchant was kind enough to direct after Jeanne Moreau had specifically requested him, and Ebert was left to wish that none of them had bothered their arses.
“The Proprietor is an astoundingly bad movie,” he began a 0.5-star review. “I could hardly believe my eyes. Or my ears, or my memory. In its attempt to tell the story of the life of a legendary French woman (perhaps, we gather, the greatest since Joan of Arc), it steps so wrong, so often, that even casting Jeanne Moreau is of no avail. If anyone can play the greatest French novelist of modern times, it is she, but not here.”
The cross-continental story followed Moreau’s author repatriating herself from the United States to her native France after discovering that her childhood home has been placed up for auction. Unfolding in multiple locations with an increasingly sprawling cast, the movie aimed for prestige and high art, but ended up boring Ebert senseless instead.
It wasn’t just boring, either; it was nonsensical. “The Proprietor is such a mess that when it was over, I was still not sure who the proprietor was,” the critic explained, which seems like a fairly fundamental error for a film to make. After all, if he sat through it for two hours and couldn’t figure out which of its many characters was the titular one, then something had clearly gone awry.
“I think maybe the title refers to Adrienne’s return to her old apartment, in which case the title should have been The Occupant, which may have been where the screenplay was originally addressed,” he mused, but even he doesn’t sound 100% convinced by his own theory, which is never a good look.
Merchant Ivory made some classics over the years, but based on Ebert’s scathing assessment, The Proprietor didn’t have a hope in hell of being remembered as one of them.
