THE QUESTION with the Merchant-Ivory team is not why they make so many “worthy” but shallow and inept films—that is what they do—but how sometimes, as in The Remains of the Day, they manage to do better. With Jefferson in Paris they’re once again true to form. For all the bustle, visual display, authentic detail, and some good performances, there is a posturing, contrived, ultimately lifeless quality here, a vapidity beneath the razzle-dazzle.
What did the years Thomas Jefferson spent as our ambassador to France mean—to the two countries concerned, to history, to him? Are we supposed to care about his platonic dalliance with the pretty Maria Cosway, a painter married to a painter? Very well, then, make us feel, for example, what kept the game platonic, and at what cost to the players. Did his alleged concubinage with his slave girl Sally Hemings, said to have borne him several children, teach him something about love or slavery? And if not, why not? Is there anything to be learned from this story that encompasses both the aftereffects of the American Revolution and the beginning of the French one? Why were the enlightened French aristocrats who helped the former along of no use in forestalling or civilizing the latter?
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