MikePadgett.com

Howards End

— Some great individual performances. A boon for Forster fans but a bit of a chore for everyone else.”

• Director: James Ivory
• United Kingdom, 1992
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There’s something grating about the bourgeois self-satisfaction of the upper middle class during Forster’s era, as it sits around babbling blithely about suffrage and philosophy. Yet for all its self-professed modernism, it took two World Wars to truly change the character of English society.

Nevertheless, Forster is documenting progress here and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplay is sharp enough to navigate the material with enough sensitivity and distinction between the three families.

Elsewhere, the locations are formidably rich and well photographed, a feature typical of all Merchant Ivory productions. And defying the otherwise sagging middle section of the film, Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson bring fizz to their scenes together, prefacing their brilliance in Ivory’s next and more accomplished effort The Remains Of The Day.