James Ivory | Howards End / 1992

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. The two Schlegel sisters, Margaret (Emma Thompson) and Helen (Helena Bonham Carter), along with their brother Tibby (Adrian Ross Magenty), encounter both the Wilcox family and the Bast couple so often that it appears, by the end of the work that the whole of Britain is a little neighborhood wherein coincidental encounters are simply to be expected.

     This is made even stranger since the aristocratic Wilcoxes, Ruth (Vanessa Redgrave) and Heny (Anthony Hopkins), along with their two sons and daughter are definitely not the “connecting” kind. Unlike the friendly and outgoing Schlegels, they see little reason to be bothered by others, preferring to stick to their own kind. Still, after meeting the Schlegels on a German excusion (which takes place before the start of the movie), they invite Helen to their home at Howards End, where she promptly falls in and out of love with Paul Wilcox (Joseph Bennett). Soon after, also by accident, the Wilcoxes rent a large home directly across the street from the Schlegels’ small apartment. Against all outward logic, the reclusive Ruth develops a deep friendship with Margaret—an intense relationship that, one might argue, Forster keeps purposely vague—to whom, on her deathbed, she attempts to will their Howards End home.

     The remaining Wilcoxes, however, refuse to believe Ruth would leave the house to a relative stranger and burn her hand-written directions. Even more remarkably, after his wife’s death, the unsociable Henry falls in love with Margaret and asks her to marry him.

    In a parallel set of coincidences, leaving a lecture, Helen accidentally walks away with Leonard Bast’s (Samuel West) umbrella, is followed home by the poor clerk, and later runs into him on a London street (just as the Schlegels had previously run into Henry on the street) and, upon finding the Basts jobless and starving—due, in part, to sisters passing along mistaken advice from Henry to that the insurance company Leonard works for is heading for bankruptcy—drags them to Evie Wilcoxes’ wedding party. As if this illogical decision were not strange enough, Mrs. Bast, Jacky (Nicola Duffett) immediately recognizes Henry as a man with whom she had had an affair as a young girl in Cyprus.

     Meanwhile, Helen has a short affair with Leonard, which ends with her becoming pregnant. And near the movie’s end Leonard desperately seeks out the Schlegels at Howards End, only to be killed by Henry’s mean-spirited son, Charles (James Wilby) in revenge.

     I discuss these numerous coincidental encounters (that 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-class 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 groupings by their perspectives to time: the

aristocratic Wilcoxes are all about the past, the Schlegels are very much of the present, and the Bast’s alas, will exist through Leonard’s son, only in the future. Within a few years, without any of them knowing it, Tibby might be off to the War, dying in the fields of Flanders. In short, the author’s original 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 it is a problem for some in the far more “realist”-bound medium of cinema.

     For all that, James Ivory’s direction comes quite brilliantly alive through his careful (also his major flaw) directorial presence, the well-crafted adaptation by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the gorgeous set decoration by Ian Whittaker, and the near-genius acting of his cast. Along with the beautiful restoration of the 1992 film which I saw again the other day in a movie theater, this film is entirely a treat for the ears and eyes.

     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, something she not only admires in her but comes to truly love. Redgrave, one of my very favorite of actors, 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 the 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 starts, 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 and Merchant’s films; as beautiful as they are, they seem to me to be like BBC Masterpiece 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 forced to rethink my opinion given my enjoyment of Howards End the other day.

    In the original fiction and in the film as well, despite Forster’s own homosexuality and the fact that only a few years later in 1913 he would pen his openly gay work Maurice (unpublished until after his death) that dealt with the same three perspectives of society, there is no elicit or even consciously coded references to the queer world. Yet the one thing that is an obviously “queer” phenomena, in the original meaning of that word, to absolutely all the characters is that Ruth wills her beloved Howards End to Margaret.

   And in his 2018 play Inheritance, playwright Matthew Lopez quite brilliantly explored the idea of “inheritance” and its relationship to gay life in relationship to Forster’s work. Jules Becker, writing in Jewish Journal of Greater Boston nicely summarizes Lopez’ basic reiterations of Forster’s text in connection with Lopez’ gay stage play:

 

“Forster’s London is now Lopez’s New York City, and the novel’s title rural location is now the play’s upstate New York home. …In Lopez’s inspired conception, Morgan – Forster’s middle name – serves as a mentor-narrator who reflects on the days long before same-sex marriage when he concealed he was gay from the public and held off publishing his 1913 novel, “Maurice,” a frank examination of the title character’s orientation.

     At the same time, the playwright provides context and contrast for the drama’s connections to “Howards End.” Theatergoers learn that Glass’s veteran grandfather helped liberate Dachau and that he inherited his West End Avenue rent-controlled apartment from his grandmother Miriam, a refugee from Germany. Once Toby moves in with Eric, the novel’s Schlegel sisters become the parallel for the pair.

     Eventually, the play’s rich title takes on specific relevance. Walter Poole – a friend for whom Eric cares greatly —leaves him the upstate home in a note. Walter’s once-closeted real estate broker love, Henry Wilcox, and his sons attempt to conceal this inheritance. (As Wilcox and his son Charles do with the willing of Howards End to Margaret Schlegel in Forster’s novel). Elsewhere, switched bags in the play call to mind the switched umbrellas in the novel, and both works include an unexpected embarrassing recognition. At various points in the play, class factors – the imminent eviction of Eric from the rent-controlled flat and well-to-do Trump-supporting Henry’s business dealings with Saudi Arabia – come into play.”

     For a fuller discussion of the parallels and the new reading it provides us of Howards End I refer the reader to Rebecca Mead’s provocative essay, “How Matthew Lopez Transformed Howards End Into an Epic Play About Gay Life,” in the September 2, 2019 issue of The New Yorker.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2016; revised December 31, 2025

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2016) and My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).