American Friends review
“American Friends” has the ambiance of E.M. Forster’s drawing room, but it’s a mad set piece based on the travel diaries of a stodgy Oxford don, whose great-grandson happens to be Michael Palin. He is both the founder and star of this sweet if thin liking article, shedding his Python skin to play the genteel Victorian — a isolated bachelor whose kindly-ordered memoirs comes in for some mussing when he finds charge from on holiday in Switzerland. Of course, he doesn’t own up to his feelings at to begin.
Set in 1861, the film finds Palin’s forebear, herein known as Mr. Ashby, reluctantly preparing for a walking holiday in Switzerland. “Holidays are anathema to me,” the proto-workaholic pompously informs his colleagues, all of them confirmed bachelors, most of them as set in their ways as Ashby.
Theirs is an all-male preserve, stately, tome-filled cloisters stale with cigar smoke from which Ashby emerges batlike to be reborn in the wide alpine meadows alive with wildflowers. Ashby initially clings to his bookish ways, but is seized one hot afternoon with the urge to splash naked in a sheeting mountain stream. An 18-year-old Irish-American girl, Elinor (Trini Alvarado), smiles tenderly upon spying the happy bather through her field glasses.
Both Elinor and her aunt, Miss Caroline Hartley (Connie Booth), are taken with the withdrawn intellectual, just as he is beguiled by their easy American manners and womanly charms. An attractive, well-educated heiress, Caroline sees Ashby as a potential husband, but then so does Elinor, an orphan doubtless in the market for a father figure. Just when the women have set their caps, Ashby, heir apparent to the presidency of St. John’s College, returns to Oxford to attend the ailing president.
Heretofore unopposed, the don is surprised to find that he has a rival in Oliver Syme (Alfred Molina), a young liberal whose reputation as a womanizer doesn’t sit well with the monkish majority. Neither does the unexpected arrival of Caroline and Elinor, whose presence endangers Ashby’s hoped-for advancement. In the meantime, the two women continue to vie for his attentions, and to his amazement, Ashby opens his heart not only to love but to a whole new life.
Tristram Powell, who directed Palin’s teleplay “East of Ipswich,” brings a steady pace and strong sense of place to this photogenic but overworked subject. “American Friends,” a well-acted if not grandly acted film, may be a new room, but it’s the same view.
“American Friends” is not rated but is suitable for general audiences.