Howard's End

Most helpful review Howard's End

• Solid adaptation in true Merchant & Ivory style

   

  By a customer from Wales , 19 Aug 2004

  [Highly rated reviewer]

  This is very much a slow-burner of a film. It moves at a leisurely pace, for much of the first half following three largely separate plot threads. Hopkins, the major reason for my selecting the film, also has very little to do in the first third or so, but patience became rewarded as his character assumes its greater prominence and the diverse elements are drawn closer together.
  
  The is on one level the story of three families and how their paths first cross and then become inextricably entwined; on another it?s an examination of the prevailing, but evolving, Edwardian, social order where a privileged and remote upper class seek to preserve for themselves their inherited and commercial wealth at the expense of an impoverished, financially insecure under-class. The former is represented by the Wilcox family, whose patriarch is superbly played by Hopkins, the latter by the Basts, while the Schlegel sisters (Thompson and Bonham-Carter) are the intellectual middle class, acting both as narrative observers and hinges on which the developing plot turns.
  
  As one would expect of this production team, the sense of time and place is well caught, and the all-British cast are just right for their essentially outwardly mannered, socially and emotionally constrained, characters. Thompson?s somewhat affected acting style, which I personally find grating in contemporarily-set films, is absolutely spot-on for this character and context; Bonham-Carter is wild-child in an appropriately restrained fashion; and although at first I thought Samual West?s accent a little strained, I quickly realised that this was actually his character Bast speaking, as trying to better himself out of his natural social class he speaks more ?properly? than perhaps would have come naturally.
  
  In terms of plot and character, the film is very faithful to its source. In translation to screen, though, perhaps some of the complexity of the novel?s metaphors and symbolism is lost. I?m not sure, if I were not familiar with the source, if the film would have been enough for me to realise the symbolism of Howard?s End itself as England / Empire, its physical location for the transformation of a rural to an urban economy, with the very subject of its inheritance serving as metaphor for what kind of new social order should prevail in society.
  
  Nevertheless, on its own merits, the film is a wonderful, slow, peripatetic, and ultimately rewarding journey.

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