The second of the Merchant/Ivory films (A Room with a View, Howard's End), Maurice deals with a theme few period pieces dare mention--a young man's struggle with his homosexuality. It's not just a gay coming-of-age story, however. The hero wrestles with British class society as much as his personal and sexual identity.

The film opens on a stormy, windswept beach, as an older man (Simon Callow) awkwardly instructs young, fatherless Maurice Hall (pronounced Morris) (James Wilby) in the "sacred mysteries" of sex.

The same turbulent, wordless struggle with passion lasts throughout this slowly evolving, beautifully filmed story. Novelist E.M. Forster's brainy, British melodrama hinges on choice and compulsion, as the pensive hero falls for two completely different men.

First comes frail, suppressed Clive (Hugh Grant), who wants nothing more than classical Platonic harmony... and a straight lifestyle. (Grant's performance is so convincing, one wonders how he ever became a heterosexual sex symbol).

After Clive's wedding, Maurice turns to hypnosis to cure his unspeakable longings. Unfortunately, his "cure" is interrupted by Clive's lustful, brooding, barely literate gamekeeper Scudder (Rupert Graves), a worker more at home gutting rabbits than discussing the classics. Maurice's love for a "social inferior" forces him to confront his illicit desire and his ingrained class snobbery.

Maurice and Clive discover the masculine love on a higher level. Later Maurice discovers the fysical love with Alec.

A lovely movie which gives an inside view on Edwardian values and how gay people were considered sick and outcasts.

To see Hugh Grant in a masculine relation might be needing a mindshift but it is worth it.

Great supporting roles by Simon Callow and Ben Kingsley.

Beautifully filmed by Merchant Ivory, with real British speech.

Lasker-Jones: England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

Maurice Hall: I'm an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort!

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