What’s a Merchant Ivory Productions movie without the Merchant? “The City of Your Final Destination” offers tantalizing, slightly sad answers. For one thing, if producer and legendary indie- film macher Ismail Merchant hadn’t died in 2005, the latest film from his longtime director and partner James Ivory probably wouldn’t have taken three years to find a distributor. It might have been a more focused film, too, instead of the exquisite, precious trifle we have before us.
But if attractive people beautifully photographed in stunning foreign locations aren’t worth a little attention, why bother going to the movies at all? Based on a novel by Peter Cameron and adapted by the Merchant-Ivory team’s longstanding writing partner, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “The City of Your Final Destination” concerns a young Iranian-American academic named Omar (Omar Metwally) who wants to write an authorized biography of a famous dead author named Jules Gund.
Gund’s surviving relatives, three expatriates living in Uruguay, say no. Omar’s girlfriend urges him to fly down and press his case; an officious beauty named Deirdre (Alexandra Maria Lara), she’s used to getting her way, and Omar does as he’s told.
In Uruguay, he finds a juicy stew of incestuous family discontent. Living on the sprawling Gund estate are the writer’s tightly wound widow, Caroline (Laura Linney), the naive young lover, Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom he had a daughter (Ambar Mallman), and his older brother Adam (Anthony Hopkins), the latter a dry Continental sort with a long-term Japanese lover named Pete (Hiroyuki Sanada). Pete’s the only one who seems to care about keeping the ranch running; the other three prefer to bicker, drink and poke holes in one another’s egos.
You don’t waste a cast like that, and “City” earns its keep just by observing Hopkins, Gainsbourg and Linney collide like irritated billiard balls. Don’t expect florid Tennessee Williams theatrics; it’s a James Ivory movie, so everyone’s lethally genteel, even when Omar and Arden find their attraction impossible to deny.
The author and his novel turn out to be MacGuffins, utterly beside the point; the drama of whether the childlike Omar will act on his feelings is the main dramatic engine, and that’s not quite enough to sustain “City.”
So our eyes tend to wander to Linney as she wrestles with her character’s bitter, brittle intelligence, or to Hopkins as he portrays an elderly gay man for whom discretion is camouflage and philosophy.
The film gets a lift when Deirdre arrives to reclaim her Omar; the standoff between her and Caroline primes you for an explosion that never comes.
“The City of Your Final Destination” is about the perils and pleasures of living on one’s memories, and that Ivory’s first movie since his partner’s death carries echoes of the one film he made before meeting Merchant is a touching resonance. Not enough to make “The City of Your Final Destination” stick, though. What was intended as a tart elegy for a vanished way of life becomes a valedictory to a certain kind of filmmaking: beautifully appointed, intelligently played and civilized into inertia.
“THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION.”
PG-13 for brief sexual situation with partial nudity. 1 hour, 58 minutes. Starring Omar Metwally, Anthony Hopkins, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Laura Linney and Alexandra Maria Lara. Directed by James Ivory. Written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on a novel by Peter Cameron. Opens today at the Chez Artiste.
