After a long weekend of tourism in the Gorge with Michael & his parents (who are visiting this week from North Carolina before departing on their Alaskan cruise out of Seattle this weekend), I decompressed Sunday night with a the new Criterion Collection edition of "Howard's End." Mind you, this sort of Brit period piece is exactly the thing I so desperately hated as a child when my mother would return from the video store with her movie night selection ("Enchanted April" was her favorite. the bane of my preteen movie-loving existence). Now that I've grown up, I have come to appreciate few cinematic delights more than experiencing a meticulously art directed, expertly mounted adaptation of a great British novel.
"Howard's End" was adapted from E.M. Forster's 1910 novel about class relations in turn-of-the-century England by the oh-so-fancy Merchant-Ivory production house and released in 1992 as the first film from distributor Sony Pictures Classics - one of the very few independent subsidiaries of the big studio system that has managed to thrive in the cutthroat economy of Hollywood and is still alive and kicking today. '
Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins are paired here as husband and wife in this, a year before their superior coupling in "The Remains of the Day" featured the quintessential 90's British thespians as the love-stricken help in a sprawling estate thwarted by the upstairs/downstairs caste system. Thompson won an Oscar for this, as did screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whose adaptation really is as good as literature-to-film translations get. Emma and Helena Bonham Carter are sisters Margaret & Helen from an intellectual bourgeois family while Hopkins plays the hioty-toity heir apparent of the Victorian capitalist Wilcox family. Vanessa Redgrave steals every scene she's in, chewing the gorgeous scenery as Wilcox matriarch Ruth, whose beloved country house Howard's End represents the spirit of rural England and pastoral tradition in stark contrast to the fast-paced sophistication of modern life and the future.
Naturally, Margaret and Henry are wed. Soon after imparting upon Margaret all the wisdom of her years and her desire for Howard's End to remain in the family as a symbol of old English tradition and rural calm, Ruth bequeaths the gorgeous vine-wrapped home to Margaret, and dies. The rest of the film is devoted to Margaret's attempts to keep Howard's End and reconcile Helen's dying hope with Henry and the rest of the greedy Wilcox assholes's insistence that the dying matriarch was not in her right mind when she left the house to Margaret (the Wilcoxes burn the written note Helen left sealing the deal and pretend it never happened).
Ultimately the movie revolves around the central question of "who will inherit England?" and posits the potential answer in either the wealth of new industrialists or the political reformations of liberalism, which reconciles both the love of money and the love of people. Guess which one wins.
The Criterion edition of "Howard's End" is seriously stunning, and I don't use that word lightly. The cover art alone speaks for itself, but the image transfer is as crisp and fully realized as if the film had opened yesterday (it's nearly 20 years old, which may not sound like much but digitial film did not exist in the early 90s and grainy video was used for everything). There are countless single shots that took my breath away, such as the lingering, breathing mist that blankets the countryside at dawn in the film's opening shot (Vanessa Redgrave slowly emerging into the sunlight through the trees and out into a sprawling field as she contemplates the morning and basks in the possibility of daybreak), which is referenced explicitly and masterfully in Joe Wright's indescribably beautiful 2005 version of "Pride and Prejudice" with Keira Knightley.
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| The first moments of "Pride and Prejudice" (2005), an homage to the opening shot in "Howard's End" |
If you've seen "Howard's End" and love it, see it again on Criterion and your appreciation will only be amplified. If, like me, you used to curse the very sight of Emma Thompson in costume and might be ready to ditch the highchair and appreciate high art, here's your opportunity. Your mom will be very pleased when you call and tell her how much you love "Howard's End" now that you've become an adult.
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