Maurice (1987): The Novel Forster Couldn't Publish, Made Into the Film It Deserved

The Story

Maurice Hall (James Wilby) arrives at Cambridge in the early twentieth century — conventional, athletic, not especially intellectual, quietly uncertain about something he cannot name. He meets Clive Durham (Hugh Grant) — brilliant, intense, beautiful in the specific way of young men who know they are going to matter — and they fall into a love that is conducted, for years, entirely without physical expression.

Clive eventually retreats. He cannot bear the risk; he marries; he becomes a conservative MP. Maurice is left alone with a desire he cannot extinguish, in a world with no language for it and no accommodation.

And then Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves), the Durhams' under-gamekeeper, comes through the window one night.

The Two Loves

The film's most intelligent structural choice — faithful to Forster — is the presentation of two entirely different kinds of love. Clive's love for Maurice is intellectual, idealised, modelled on the Greek love he has studied at Cambridge: beautiful young men in spiritual communion, the body never involved. It is, in its way, genuine. It is also insufficient, and the film understands this without dismissing it.

Alec's love — sudden, physical, working-class, wordless at first — is the corrective. What Maurice has been waiting for without knowing it. The class difference, which the film takes seriously, is also the liberation: Alec does not have Clive's cultural investment in keeping desire abstract.

The contrast is Forster's sharpest observation: that the men who had the education to theorise homosexuality were often the ones least able to live it.

The Performances

Grant plays Clive at twenty-six, in the performance that should have established him as a serious actor rather than a light comedian — though cinema had other plans for him. He gives Clive the full complexity the character requires: genuine feeling, genuine cowardice, genuine self-deception. When Clive tells Maurice he has cured himself, the horror on Grant's face is the horror of a man saying something he knows is a lie and has decided to live inside anyway.

Wilby's Maurice is harder to play and equally well done: a less immediately compelling character than Clive, but the more important one — the man who refuses to cure himself, who insists on the reality of what he is, who eventually finds that insistence rewarded. It is a subtle performance that the film's reputation has somewhat obscured.

Graves as Alec is warmth and physicality and a completely unself-conscious ease that the two Cambridge men, with all their education, cannot access.

The Visual World

Ivory and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme shoot Edwardian England with a visual opulence that is simultaneously beautiful and pointed. The cricket grounds, the country houses, the Cambridge courts, the London clubs — all of it gorgeous, all of it a world from which Maurice is structurally excluded by the fact of what he is. The beauty of the world the film shows us is the beauty of the world that won't have him.

The contrast with Alec's world — the servants' quarters, the boathouse, the ferry that will take him to Argentina if Maurice doesn't come to him — is the film's sharpest visual argument.

The Happy Ending

Forster was right that the ending was what the story needed. Maurice ends with the two men together, deciding to build their life outside the society that won't accommodate them — a decision that means the loss of everything Maurice has, and the gain of the only thing that matters.

It is not a realistic ending, exactly. But it is a true one. It says: this is what it would take, and this is what it would be worth.

Why It Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is a platform that believes gay desire is worth the full resources of serious craft. *Maurice* is the film that proved that belief in the heritage drama format — one of the most prestigious and conservative in British cinema — and proved it beautifully.

It also gave gay men an ending. After a century of tragic conclusions, two men got to walk away together into the greenwood. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed.