Still Life of Anthony Hopkins

By RICHARD CORLISS

Anthony Hopkins is Stevens the butler, the old bulldog of Darlington Hall. In the thrust of his Churchillian jaw one can read a declaration of honorable purpose; in his blue eyes one can hear the quiet bark, feel the dogged bite. Stevens lives to serve his master and to rule the servants. Upstairs his step is tentative and his eyes aim for the carpet. Downstairs, as Chairman of the Board, he has a sturdy stride and an imperious gaze. He knows his place all too well. He believes it his job to hear nothing while above, to surrender to no soft impulse when below. That is why Stevens was deaf to the nasty political business that took place in the drawing rooms and why he was blind to the fuller life he might have shared with the flinty housekeeper, Miss Kenton.

Stevens is the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's 1988 novel, The Remains of the Day, a drama so delicate that it touches the reader deeply without applying the pressure of sentiment. The story runs on parallel tracks: the years before World War II, when Stevens worked for his beloved Lord Darlington, an aristocrat who falls into an alliance with the Nazis; and the late '50s, when ! Stevens seeks out Miss Kenton in hopes she will return as housekeeper and, perhaps, something more. In his own ornate, unknowing words, Stevens condemns himself as the English version of a "good German": a man who disappointed Miss Kenton, his father (an aged butler), his country and himself in blinkered devotion to duty.

The lovely film that James Ivory (director), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (screenwriter) and Ismail Merchant (producer) have made of The Remains of the Day has the hallmarks of their best recent work: the aggrieved passion of Howards End, the acutely drawn sense of loss in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. They have peppered the story with deft details that illuminate the cottage industry of running a lavish estate: snipped hedges, gleaming doorknobs, decapitated fowl, the Times pages freshly ironed each morning. And they have filled the house with a perfect cast: Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton; James Fox as Lord Darlington; Peter Vaughn as Stevens' father, the proud old retainer who will never say die -- even when he does. These characters, like those in The Age of Innocence, are all genteel anachronisms. They sin, in our eyes, by not daring to sin; they are poignant in their fidelity to tattered principles. The muted tones of Ivory's film tell you that this is a ghost story without corpses.

This time Ivory and his longtime colleagues have gone their source one better, or one quieter: the film is even more discreet, more Stevens-like, than the book. They have withheld the revelations of tears and admission of heartbreak that finally clatter around the butler like broken Wedgwood. Here, Stevens will never wake violently from his reverie of duty served; he will be trapped in Darlington Hall like a bird that can't find an open window. So the filmmakers have dared believe that the audience will detect these domestic cataclysms in the performance of the man who plays Stevens.

Hopkins, of course. No other actor of his generation need apply. Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi -- each brings the handsomely monogrammed baggage of an outsize personality. They would be too big for the role, tell too much. Hopkins is just the man for this. For much of his career, as a prissy Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter (his first film, 1968) or the Rupert Murdoch-like press baron in the 1985 play Pravda, he had his own suitcase of mannerisms: the clipped elocution, the run-on sentence, all the pensive ahhs and umms. But with age and stardom, he has discovered how to be still. He knows he can do less and be more. Audiences will study him like a weather-worn statue for hints of darkness, heroism, meaning. Like Stevens, he learned to serve, and to seek greatness in serving.

His friend the English actor Julian Fellowes had passed along this comment about a good butler: When he's in the room, the room is emptier. "I took that," Hopkins says, "and kept it in my head for the entire film. It was simple: just stand still." So much of the comedy in his role, and the sadness, arise from this stillness. Before a hunt, Stevens holds a drinking cup for a horseman; the aristocrat takes no notice of his offer, and the butler takes no notice of the slight. His stillness may mask sexual fear: when Miss Kenton amiably approaches him, he freezes like a bruised virgin. The rest of the film Hopkins carries with a small gnomic smile that means a dozen things in a dozen scenes: gratitude, impatience, self-control. "I can say it's simple now," the actor acknowledges, "but it's taken years to distill my work to a more economic form. I suppose I'm pretty adept now at playing these rather still parts."

To moviegoers, Hopkins became famous playing a "still part": Hannibal Lecter, the voracious serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs. He not only won an Oscar, he also vaulted into instant celebrity. "I thought it would be the role of a lifetime." He was right, and it is a celebrity he frankly relishes. He will phone the secretary of a chum and identify himself as "her friend who likes to eat people."

Hopkins can be so engagingly heedless about stardom because, he says, "I've never really planned out a career. I've gone along with -- call it destiny, luck, whatever. I've very much been that sort of person my entire life." Born New Year's Eve 1937 in Port Talbot, Wales, the son of a master confectioner and baker, Hopkins entered the Cardiff School of Music and Drama to study piano. "I was a poor student," he says, "very slow, very backward. I drifted into acting because, literally, I had nothing better to do."

Like many British actors, he busily shuttled from the subsidized stage to the West End, from movies to TV, in the U.K. and the U.S. But a spell of boozing helped end his first marriage and jeopardized his career. Today he alludes to those troubled times in his patented short sentences: "I'm not unique. People have bad patches and good patches. I don't dwell in the past. Don't look back on it. It's over, done. Buried. The past is dead as a doornail. You can't undo it. It's all there."

He reacts with the same equanimity to the good fortune that is lately his: fame, top roles (another one, as C.S. Lewis to Debra Winger's Joy Gresham in Shadowlands, coming at Christmas) and a solid second marriage of 20 years. "I'm 55, and I feel like 25," he says. "I've reached a point in my life where there's nothing to win, nothing to lose and nothing to prove." Call him Ordinary Joe. Or, rather, as of this year, Sir Ordinary Joe. "My wife told me I'd gotten a letter offering a knighthood. I said, 'Oh my God, what for?' When good things happen, you think, God, has that really happened? Like the Oscar. I kept getting up in the middle of the night and saw it sitting on the table. Couldn't believe it."

Anthony Hopkins smiles. Like Stevens, he has the strength of opaqueness. Unlike Stevens, he is a man secure in his age, and very much his own master.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles