HOWARD'S END
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
HOWARD'S END is a film directed by James Ivory, produced by Ismail Merchant, and written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, from the novel by E. M. Forster. It stars Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, Samuel West, Nicola Duffett, and Joseph Bennet. Rated PG for mature themes.
HOWARD'S END is the latest and, I think, the best film yet from the team of Merchant, Ivory, and Jhabvala. Their previous collaborations, of course, include two other Forster novels (ROOM WITH A VIEW and MAURICE), MR. AND MRS. BRIDGE, and THE BOSTONIANS (my least favorite). It doesn't hurt anyone that the source novel is Forster's masterpiece, but a less gifted writer than Jhabvala could easily have gotten lost in the many layers and characters, the scope, of the original. She is faithful to the spirit of the novel, she gives literal renditions of individual scenes and fearlessly condenses other pages into a gesture or a line of dialogue. The result is light, effortless, graceful, lively, funny, fascinating, and alarming. The production values are high, precise, and convincing. Ivory's direction is delicate and evocative. And the actors constitute a dream cast.
First, let us praise Vanessa Redgrave as Ruth Wilcox, the ethereal, the glad-to-be-protected, the ailing, the intensely passionate, the owner of Howard's End, the country house at the heart of the story. Redgrave's part is a short one, but it is a characterization of such strength and originality as to be sure to stay with you for a long time to come. Ruth's unwordliness and fragility come through in such things as her slow, gravely impassioned speech. As the materfamilias of the nouveau riche Wilcoxes, she cares only for Howard's End; it alone is the family home, despite all the residential properties her husband owns. The opening scene is of Ruth walking in the moonlight at Howard's End, and Redgrave tells us everything in the way she walks, wraithlike, floating in her heavy, trailing evening gown.
Anthony Hopkins also gives a devastating portrait of Henry Wilcox, the great man of business, the prig, the hypocrite, the keeper of secret guilts, the fragile monster. If Hopkins is not the best male actor in the English-language cinema, he is surely in the running; he brings to life an unsympathetic character in a way wholly different from the intense scene-chewing of his Hannibal Lecter. He even looks like a wholly different person.
But it is Emma Thompson, seen last year in HENRY V and DEAD AGAIN, who is the heart and soul of this movie and who has the most difficult role. She plays Margaret Schlegel, the older of the two sisters, wise, patient, dotty, witty, cultured, civilized. Margaret's friendship with Ruth is the one pure love of the story, but her involvement with the dreadful Wilcox is the great mystery of the story. Thompson illuminates every scene she is in with her grace and civility. Margaret is a breakthrough role for her, especially since the overwhelming Kenneth Branaugh, her husband, is nowhere in evidence here.
Helena Bonham Carter evinces a breakthrough all her own. Gone is the pouty ingenue. Instead, here we have an angry, mature woman, who is fearlessly honest and who insists that everyones take responsibility for his or her actions. As Helen Schlegel, she walks the thin line between radicalness and madness. She is as much the modern woman as Margaret is the old-fashioned one, and they are the only two uncorrupted characters in the story. It is as if Helen's vision leads her past the confusion of the transitional Edwardian society that her contemporaries are caught up in and onto a more frightening, lonelier, more honest world.
The other actors are each much to be commended, especially Nicola Duffett, Samuel West, and Prunella Scales in particular. Duffet plays the tartish Julie Bast; her great scene is in the tea tent at an ostentatious society wedding. West plays Leonard Bast, the victim of class prejudice and interfering do-gooders; Bast is a clerk with aspirations to rise above his station. He is proud but foolish, stuffy and passionate, caught in the trap of trying to do the right thing with only novels to tell what that is. Scales is fluffy and lovable as the Devon aunt of the Schlegel sisters. (By the way, Simon Callow, a Merchant-Ivory regular, makes a cameo appearance as a pompous lecturer.)
Besides the acting, I highly recommend both the music and the cinematography. Alas, I have the name of neither director in front of me. Let me say merely that HOWARD'S END is as much a delight to the eye and ear as to the intellect.
I high recommend HOWARD'S END, even at full ticket price.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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