Film review

James Ivory (1992)

Howards End has aged well.  I don’t know if I failed to appreciate its virtues in 1992 or if nostalgia for the Merchant-Ivory narrative style has set in now, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed the film twenty-five years after its original release.  The pace, though never sluggish, is unhurried:  James Ivory and the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who are faithful to E M Forster’s novel, unfold its themes gradually, enabling them to be fully appreciated.  They capture, with clarity and economy, the characters’ different cultural inheritances, the class (and wealth) distinctions at work in their relationships.  Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala dramatise the crucial tension between the different values of the two main families – the liberal humanity of the cultured Schlegels, the materialistic drive of the philistine Wilcoxes.

Before their connection is eventually formalised through marriage, the families collide repeatedly and in several ways.  First, there’s the short-lived romance (and even shorter-lived engagement) between the younger Wilcox son Paul (Joseph Bennett) and Helen Schlegel (Helena Bonham Carter), while she’s staying with the family at Howards End, their country home.  The house belongs to the Wilcox materfamilias Ruth (Vanessa Redgrave), whose acquaintance Helen and her sister Margaret (Emma Thompson) had made on holiday in Germany the previous year.  A few months after Helen’s ill-fated stay with them, the Wilcoxes take a flat in London, which happens to be on the opposite side of the street on which the Schlegels live.  Margaret and the ailing Ruth Wilcox become friends; on her deathbed, Ruth writes a note bequeathing Howards End to Margaret.  Ruth’s widower, the hard-headed businessman Henry (Anthony Hopkins), presides over a family conference that decides to ignore and destroy the note.

A subsequent chance meeting marks the start of a growing mutual attraction between Henry and Margaret.  They become engaged, to the displeasure, for different reasons, of both Henry’s children and Margaret’s sister.  Helen, whose feelings about the Wilcoxes have been prickly since her mortifying romantic experience at Howards End, has since adopted as a worthy cause Leonard Bast (Samuel West), a young insurance clerk anxious both to make ends meet and to further his education.  Helen bitterly resents Henry’s careless and counterproductive advice that Leonard move to a different insurance company.   This leads to a three-way family collision:  the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes and the Basts – Leonard and his wife Jacky (Nicola Duffett), the troubled ‘fallen woman’ whom he felt morally compelled to marry.  Determined that Henry, quite literally, doesn’t lose sight of the now jobless Leonard, Helen gatecrashes the wedding reception of the Wilcox daughter (Jemma Redgrave), with the Basts in tow.  Hungry and thirsty, Jacky has too much to drink but she recognises Henry as a man who once had sex with her, a pivotal revelation.  This is far from the whole story but it’s enough for this note – and not just because E M Forster’s novel is so well known:  reducing Howards End to a series of events gives a misleading impression of melodrama, unfair to Forster and to the people who made this film.

By the time their Howards End reached the screen, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory were already the go-to partnership for audiences eager for decorous, opulent period drama, even though those adjectives are a travesty of Merchant-Ivory’s favoured authors, Forster and Henry James.  (Merchant-Ivory had previously adapted A Room With a View, Maurice, The Europeans and The Bostonians for the screen.)  It was hard not to be aware of the sizeable middlebrow audience primed to coo at the furnishings, frocks and past-times comfort of the Merchant-Ivory world.  I think this awareness – and not wanting to be part of this kind of enthusiasm – blinded me to the merits of Howards End.  Shot by Tony Pierce-Roberts, designed by Luciana Arrighi and Ian Whittaker, costumed by Jenny Beaven and John Bright, the film is pictorially beautiful but it’s much more too.  Visual details recur and, because they feature in sequences that are emotionally very different from one another, resonate strongly: gowns trailing on the grassy bank outside Howards End; lights within the house, viewed from without; notes thrown on the fire.  The occasional repetition of words reverberates too – like the phrase ‘ever so long’, at the beginning and end of a conversation between Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilcox.

The narrative rhythm and tone are less satisfying in the closing stages (oddly enough, something similar happened in David Lean’s film of Forster’s A Passage to India).  Some of the later scenes are too emphatic, others are overpowered by Richard Robbins’s score.    When James Ivory pushes for a powerful image, it can appear bombastic and artificial – as in Leonard Bast’s fatal collapse, bringing a bookcase and its contents symbolically down on top of him.  Less attention-grabbing moments involving this character are eloquent.  After his first visit to the space and light of the Schlegels’ home, Leonard registers silent dismay on his return to the cramped rented room he shares with Jacky.   It’s close to a railway line, the place repeatedly shaken by the noise and shot through with the flicker of passing trains.  He doggedly continues to wear a work suit; there’s a poignant glimpse of his creased shirt collar.

Similarly, a few illustrations of the clash of family values are harshly unconvincing – James Wilby is too dynamically nasty as Charles Wilcox, for example – but more are persuasive.  Margaret and Helen, scions of a middle-class, intellectual Anglo-German family, are benevolently keen to encourage Leonard’s intellectual ambition and unaware – until he becomes, for Helen, an altogether more serious business – that they treat Leonard as a rather amusing curiosity.  Henry’s curt indulgence of his new wife’s books makes it all the clearer that he thinks them a waste of time.

The explicit brusqueness and implicit underlying brutality of Anthony Hopkins’s Henry are impressive, even if their powerful combination makes Margaret’s love for him harder to credit.  Emma Thompson’s face is animated and expressive.  Her characteristic tone and phrasing, which can be tiresome, are just right here, getting across, in addition to the well-meaning Margaret’s intelligent sincerity, her sometimes overbearing quality.  Vanessa Redgrave is very good:  she would have been even better if her presence and voice had complemented each other more.  Both are otherworldly and the fey line readings detract from some of Ruth Wilcox’s recollections but the effect is unarguably compelling:  Redgrave doesn’t have much screen time but she leaves, very appropriately in the role she’s playing, a legacy that persists throughout the film.  Helena Bonham Carter and Samuel West give admirably committed performances and Nicola Duffett is touching as the fleshy, vulnerable Jacky.    The cast also includes Prunella Scales as the Schlegel sisters’ hyperactive aunt and Adrian Ross Magenty as their hypoactive brother.

28 July 2017