The City of Your Final Destination finds the cracks in an aristocratic life

A A A Comments (0) By Nick Pinkerton Thursday, Jul 1 2010

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James Ivory and cast make every scene flutter with feeling in this adaptation of Peter Cameron's 2002 novel, The City of Your Final Destination, written for the screen by Ivory's collaborator-of-fifty-years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Omar (Omar Metwally), an American Ph.D. student, shows up unannounced at a secluded Uruguayan country estate to petition the household of novelist and suicide Jules Gund for permission to write the great man's biography, the completion of which would guarantee a professorship (a fate worse than death, it's implied). Omar must impress Gund's stranded 28-year-old mistress, Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg), his shunned forty-something wife, Caroline (Laura Linney) — loath to publicize their menage — and his elder brother, Adam (Anthony Hopkins, with Hiroyuki Sanada as his longtime companion). These are Merchant-Ivory cosmopolitans, people who quote Persian poets before dulcet landscapes. But even life among this aristocracy of the sensitive is not without complexities, with everyone trapped in their age-appropriate life-crises. Arden and Omar's flirtation is interrupted when his girlfriend (Alexandra Maria Lara) arrives; dashing, weak Omar, less self-willed than the average heroine of a nineteenth-century marriage novel, hereafter recedes behind the women. Best is Linney, conquering scenes as the acrid and touching Caroline, her regal bitterness a shield against nostalgia, dressed Park Avenue posh to drink alone.