Who speaks of Howards End these days? Who expounds on the virtues of this magnificent drama, whose traditional style seems almost as distant as its Edwardian setting? Seen today, years past its 1992 release, it strikes one as not only the ultimate accomplishment of the Merchant Ivory team but also the high-water mark of a certain kind of filmmaking, a landmark example of movies of passion, taste, and sensitivity that honestly touch every emotion. Below its exquisitely modulated surface, this film may set off lasting and heartfelt reverberations in the viewer; every time you see it, it moves you in different ways.
Certainly, Howards End was appreciated in its day. Made for only eight million dollars, it received nine Oscar nominations, including for best picture, director, cinematography, and supporting and lead actress, for Vanessa Redgrave and Emma Thompson. The latter won, along with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s script and Luciana Arrighi and Ian Whittaker’s art direction and set decoration. But the film seems to have been half-forgotten precisely because of those old-fashioned qualities once heralded as its strengths. Beyond its already distant source material—E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel of families in love and conflict—it offers filmmaking techniques that owe nothing to the flash and dash of contemporary movies. Yet alongside an elegantly unfolding script and impeccable acting across the board from people like Anthony Hopkins, as well as Redgrave and most especially Thompson, extravagant directorial flourishes would have just gotten in the way.
After creating a number of films in Edwardian dress, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory knew how to be more than merely faithful to the look of those times—they knew how to make that world seem genuinely inhabited. From production designer Arrighi, who was after “how people lived, not a set,” to costume designer Jenny Beavan, who wanted “real clothes made in an authentic way,” the level of realism in Howards End is all the more convincing for its having been so casually accomplished.
Experience is essential in sustaining such restraint, and Merchant, Ivory, and Prawer Jhabvala had been collaborating for thirty years when they undertook this project. Nothing else they did, not even the splendidly comic A Room with a View, which came before, or the somber The Remains of the Day, released a year later, would match this achievement. What sets Howards End apart, what raises this work to a new level of emotional artistry, are its characters’ complex inner lives. Having a novelist as psychologically acute as Forster to work from certainly gave a leg up to all concerned. In addition to his facility with character and relationships, Forster was dealing with a powerful theme in Howards End, the pangs of a society in terrible flux. A serpent was loose in the genteel garden that was Edwardian England: the modern world, fated to bite everyone and change everything. The only question was, how great the change?
Like the novel it follows so closely, the film begins not head-on but from an angle, with a peripheral but telling relationship. Helen Schlegel (Helena Bonham Carter) is visiting the Wilcoxes, a family that she and her sister, Margaret (Thompson), met the previous spring at Howards End, the Wilcoxes’ romantic old pile of an English country home. Helen and one of the Wilcox sons become briefly infatuated with each other, which leads to the comic intervention of the Schlegel girls’ busybody Aunt Juley (Prunella Scales). The young people are soon separated, but though everyone assumes all ties have been severed, the two families are fated to interconnect more than anyone suspects.
Certainly, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes seem worlds apart. The three Schlegel siblings (besides Helen and Margaret, there’s their rather ineffectual younger brother, Tibby) are decorous, cultured people with a lively interest in London’s intellectual scene. The Wilcoxes, by contrast, are typified by patriarch Henry (Hopkins), the embodiment of triumphant capitalism; the wealthy head of the Imperial and West African Rubber Company, Henry is abrupt, distant, and often unfeeling. But when the Wilcoxes come to London for a stay and take a flat across the street from the Schlegels, Henry’s wife, Ruth (Redgrave), and Margaret renew their acquaintance. Quite different from her children and her in-laws, who tend to be venal and small-minded, Ruth is passionate: she’s in love with English tradition in general and with the property at Howards End—which belongs to her, not her husband—in particular. Though she would not seem to have much in common with the chatty, terribly up-to-date Margaret—she doesn’t even believe in giving women the vote—the two find an unspoken emotional kinship growing between them.
Meanwhile, the impulsive and high-strung Helen mistakenly takes the wrong umbrella (a habit of hers) as she leaves a music lecture and thus inadvertently meets one Leonard Bast (Samuel West, the real-life son of actress Scales). The beautifully constructed scene where he takes off after her, umbrellaless in a downpour, showcases nearly without words their contrasting personalities: she impulsive and heedless, he both dogged and aggrieved. A low-paid clerk at an insurance company, Bast is stuck in an economically precarious situation, which makes him touchy and easily offended. Possessed of an awfully earnest poetic soul, he is dazzled by the Schlegels’ easy, spirited ways and by the cultured, idealistic world they so effortlessly inhabit. Though the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and Bast obviously stand in for different social classes, it is the grace of Howards End to make us care desperately about them simply as people.
Because it’s confident of its story and its powers, Howards End takes the time to establish itself, and allows its varied characters the space to demonstrate their subtleties and complexities. Far from being presented to us fully formed, Margaret and Helen and Leonard and Henry gradually develop and change, revealing who they are not only to the audience but often simultaneously to themselves and each other as well. None of this would be possible, of course, without acting of the most delicate sort, and Howards End so excels in that department, so matches performer to part, it’s fair to say that these roles can be considered career high points for all concerned.
With her abundant Pre-Raphaelite hair, Bonham Carter is perfectly cast as a woman who, in the actress’s words, “is all action and impulse and passion.” At the opposite end of the emotional scale is Anthony Hopkins’s vivid, thoughtful work as a paragon of male energy and achievement, a man who is more indifferent to good than he is actually bad; Hopkins’s prior role was his Oscar-winning turn as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs—Merchant went through that film’s sound editor to get the actor the script—but this performance is perhaps even meatier. And though she doesn’t have a lot of screen time, Redgrave (who agreed to the role when Merchant impulsively doubled her salary) makes a singular impression as Ruth Wilcox, a wan and vulnerable wraith from a dying world. The film’s opening, with Ruth wandering around the moody twilight of the Howards End garden and looking inside the house at a bright and lively dinner party, is a succinct and expressive way to begin a drama that emphasizes both the need for and the difficulty of emotional connection across barriers.
If it can be said that one performance is the heart of Howards End, it would have to be Thompson’s. Though she has since gone on to become an international movie star (and even won another Oscar, this time for her screenplay of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility), when Howards End came out, she was best known in this country as actor-director Kenneth Branagh’s wife. This singular role changed Thompson’s reputation overnight—because though you don’t immediately suspect it, Margaret Schlegel is the force that powers Howards End, the only character possessed of the moral strength to cope with a society in extremis. With her bright smile and chatterbox tendencies, and given to bustling into restaurants and saying things like “I want to eat heaps,” she seems at first glance little more than a cheery, blithe spirit. But the triumph of Thompson’s performance is the way she projects emotional intelligence and gradually allows us to see past that surface to how wise and substantial Margaret is.
An actress who can break your heart just by widening her eyes, Thompson entirely takes over this part and, as Forster’s surrogate in the story, manages the extremely difficult feat of making decency and caring heroic and dramatically captivating. The triumph of these virtues, like the triumph of Howards End, happens gradually, but to see this exceptional film is to know that the wait has definitely been worth it.
Kenneth Turan is film critic for the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, as well as the director of the Times Book Prizes. His latest books are Never Coming to a Theater Near You and Now in Theaters Everywhere.
1992
142 min
Color
2.35:1
Categories: Film Essays
5 Comments
Sun 01 Nov at 07:12 PM
john brinkman
Very happy to see this review from Turan. I was captivated by this movie, the first time i saw it, from beginning to end. Howards End is a journey, an enjoyable one, with a devastating conclusion. It is also a kind of mystery (imagine a more subtle, nuanced, deeper Evil Under the Sun, another character driven drama, without the campiness). The mystery being the intertwining of people’s lives and how they connect. But the journey itself is a carefully paced thrill ride.
There is great heart and humanity in each character. And this is because of the actors and actresses chosen. Helen Bonham Carter and Samuel West should have been acknowledged with Oscar nominations. They were overshadowed by the powerhouse talent of Hopkins, Thompson and Redgrave.
Mon 09 Nov at 12:42 PM
Judith Terry
Although every word Turan writes earned a vigorous nod from us, we left the movie off our 100-best list, reluctantly. Nothing to do with the movie, but all to do with the original novel: the character of Leonard Bast. Each time we have watched the movie (and read the novel), the way in which Bast is so hopelessly out of his depth in the society to which he so much aspires struck us both as just too manipulated, too dedicated to his disaster. Without desiring a happy ending, we wish Ivory-Merchant had tweaked Forster a bit!
Mon 09 Nov at 05:39 PM
Stephen Cowles
I cannot recall if I read the novel first and then saw the movie, or vice versa. One led to another. Either way, both are inspirational to me. First, there’s Foster’s message of “Only connect,” to which Margaret Schlegel (for example) nobly aspires. She doesn’t force change, as Henry Wilcox might. Second, is trust or interest in one another, regardless of class (Mrs. Wilcox and Margaret; Helen and Leonard Bast). Third, the skill and sincerity of the actors and actresses combined with the Merchant and Ivory team make this visualization a feast.
Tue 10 Nov at 11:14 AM
Sean William Menzies
I have a curious history with Howards End. I used to work as an assistant manager at Laemmle Theatres here in LA when the film premiered at the Royal in Santa Monica. I had just read the novel and when we got the first trailer in for the film, I was blown away by the perfection of the casting.
Then, many years later, as an assistant film editor, I ended working with the editor of Howards End on The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood and we are still very good friends.
Then again, many years later, my brothers and I were in England staying with some friends who live in Reading, just two miles down the road from Peppard Cottage, the house used as Howards End in the film. With a coincidence like that, there was no way I was going to miss a photo op, so we drove up quickly and took some pics of the house. A nice young English couple live in the back part, as caretakers, with their insane, yapping tiny dog. I didn’t get to go inside but stood on the porch, touched the railing, door handle, brick. I looked into the front windows and was shocked to see the room where Leonard Bast is killed filled with junk and old furniture, as if the place was being used as storage. Last I heard, an American businessman bought it from the Shaplands who owned it during the filming.
Anyway, the Blu-ray. I am slightly disappointed in it. The sound is a marvel, just outstanding and worth the upgrade alone. The picture is another matter; what has been reviewed as film grain is actually digital noise, especially in the darker areas and scenes, and it’s awful. You can tell this by pausing the image on those scenes, the “grain” actually has structure, digital structure, which film grain does not. Film grain is softer and puts the image together nicely. This digital grain, especially during the shot where Jackie is sitting on the bed awaiting Leonard while the train is racketing behind the windows, is awful – horizontal structuring can be seen in the washed out dark areas, as if a Lo Con print was used. No other blu-ray I own, even from Criterion, has this problem, and most of the darker shot on the Howards End disc are relatively good.
But the image for the most part is bright and clear, a little thin, not the rich experience it is in the cinema, but the detail and color spectrum are much, much better than any past release.
Two other quibbles, then I’ll let this looooooong diatribe go. Costume designer Jenny Beavan’s name has always been misspelled in the opening credits as “Bevan” and I thought they would actually fix it for this release. Nope. And the film was shot Super 35mm for 70mm blow up, so a 2.20:1 crop on the image is vastly more pleasing than the 2.35:1 (Scope) aspect ratio that it is usually framed for on home video. There is too much information to the left and right and it the action and characters tend to be lumped in the middle of the frame, but in 2.20:1 it is perfectly comfortable and nothing of importance is lost to the left and right.
There. I’m done. Nice essay by Turan. And still a nice blu-ray despite my hangups over aspect ratio, misspelled names and that god awful digital noise in some of the black areas.
Wed 24 Feb at 03:07 PM
David Hollingsworth
I have actually never seen Howard’s End, but thanks to Criterion, I will be glad to. Plus, I’m glad that it is now available on regular 2-Disc DVD, not just blu-ray, so I will be able to watch it.
Add Comment