connections
by
Douglas Messerli
Ruth
Prawer Jhabvala (screenplay, based on the novel by E. M. Forster), James Ivory
(director) Howards End / 1992
“Only connect”
is the epigraph to E.M. Forster’s novel Howards
End, and in the James Ivory film,
based on Forster’s work, the characters spend most of their time connecting, most
often by accident, both emotionally and intellectually. Indeed the two Schlegel
sisters, Margaret (Emma Thompson) and Helen (Helena Bonham Carters), along with
their brother Tibby (Adrian Ross Magenty), encounter both the Wilcox family and
the Bast couple so often, that it appears that the whole of Britain is a little
neighborhood wherein coincidental encounters are simply to be expected.
I discuss these several coincidental
encounters (there are even more) simply to reiterate just how “creaky” is
Forster’s plot. If someone were to attempt to explain these series of events in
real life, I think we would all suspect their honesty—or even sanity.
It’s clear that Forster was using these
three different sets of people—aristocrats, well-off bourgeoisie, and working folk—to
speak of the Edwardian Age on the edge, literally, of significant changes,
resulting in the death of the first, the resurgence of the second, and the rise
of the last. He also, more subtly, interweaves these three grouping by their
perspectives to time: the aristocratic Wilcoxes are all about the past, the
Schlegels are very much in the present, and the Bast’s, alas, will exist
through Leonard’s son, only in the future. In short, the original author’s
tale, although richly written and entertaining, is a thoroughly artificial one,
having little to do with real life. That never bothers me in fiction, but is a
problem for some in the far more “realistically” bound medium of cinema.
Emma Thompson as Margaret is near perfect in
her often clumsy forwardness and her near endless patter, but also in the
subtle mental changes that connubial betrayal and the gradual recognition of
her husband’s cruel actions enact. If she begins the film as a strong-willed,
forward-thinking idealist, she ends it by being more like her quiet,
self-reflective friend Ruth, truly becoming the rightful resident of the
elder’s beloved house.
Redgrave’s Ruth is a far more difficult
and self-contradictory character, a woman relieved in not being able to vote,
yet who finds Margaret a remarkable figure: as a woman who despite her
self-conscious awkwardness is capable of doing great good. Redgrave, one of my
very favorite of actresses, is not quite perfect for this role, and has a few
mannerisms here that I’ve not previously noticed. Yet, she is always so amazing
to watch that she does almost carry it off.
Although prone to overacting by underplaying
every role, Anthony Hopkins as Henry comes off more straight-forwardly in this
work as a failed, even, at times, somewhat evil human being who, nonetheless,
is also a highly vulnerable one, who realizes, at film’s end, that he has
helped to make his son Charlie into an even more detestable man than himself.
Carter’s Helen is a more transparent being
without the depths of her older sister, but yet by film’s end she certainly shines
as an independent force, willing, without shame, to raise her son to care
for the world around him.
Even minor figures such as Leonard, with
his dreamy intellectual pursuits of nature and the stars, is well portrayed by
West; and as his overweight and courser wife, Jacky, Duffett is nearly perfect.
Like Pauline Kael, I have long carried a
kind of grudge about Ivory’s films; as beautiful as they are, they seemed to me
to be more like a BBC Masterpieces series rather than more challenging and
original cinema. There is the aura of “literary” about most of them, and they
often simply smell of libraries and museums from which the director and writer
have adapted their stories. Yet, after all these years, I might be able to
rethink my opinion given my enjoyment of Howards
End the other day.
Los Angeles,
September 7, 2016
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