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This is a daring strategy, especially since Lean is not a man who likes to explain what he is doing, much less call attention to his command of technique or to his personality or creative philosophy. He is assuredly an auteur, but not one who uses that status to gain entrée to the talk shows and the rest of celebrity's dubious glories. Nevertheless, Passage has been doing excellent business in the three cities where it has opened in the past two weeks—New York, Los Angeles and Toronto—and it is already being recognized as a major achievement. The New York Film Critics Circle last week named Passage the best movie and Lean the best director of the year. This bodes well not only for commercial success as the film begins to open more widely, but also for Oscar nominations in February.
So Lean's risky enterprise appears likely to pay off handsomely. But make no mistake; it was probably the most audacious chance yet taken by this 76-year-old director, whose movie career and stylistic roots go back to the days of silent film, which coincide roughly with the period in which Forster's novel was finished.
As with all movies, the gamble was partly economic, but not primarily so. In fact, at a time when the merely average movie, nowhere near as long (2 hr. 43 min.), complex or striking to look at, costs about $11 million, and in a year when competing pictures like Dune and The Cotton Club ran up tabs in the $50 million range, Passage, at around $16 million, seems like a bargain. Its budget is a tribute to an ascetic director's waste-not-want-not ability to visualize precisely what he wants on paper, then put it on film efficiently and economically.
No, the real risk was one of the spirit rather than the purse. For Lean had not made a movie since 1970, when he completed the critically and financially disappointing Ryan's Daughter. He passed some of the ensuing years in bitterness, wounded by reviewers who so often tend to listen to movies more intently than they look at them, thus missing much of his special grace and subtlety. Some of his time was wasted on a two-part retelling of the saga of Captain Bligh and the Bounty, which its producer either could not or would not finance in its full power and glory. Since his current producers, John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, had almost as much trouble rounding up the money for Passage, Lean's cold contempt for movie magnates might even exceed his ire at critics.
For a man like him, austere and passionate, to attempt a comeback after these misadventures, and at his age, was an act of extraordinary creative nerve. To do so with an adaptation of a book that, however beguiling its surfaces, has been a conundrum for readers ever since its publication 60 years ago, was flirting dangerously with calamity. After all, a novel that speaks in a quiet adult voice, and that proceeds from delicate ironies to the contemplation of metaphysical mysteries, is not your customary movie property. That Lean has brought this essentially schizoid work to the screen with such sureness, elegance and hypnotic force is akin to a miracle.