There’s a melancholy meditation somewhere in Howards End about the emotional hold a certain place can have on a person—anchored in Vanessa Redgrave’s evanescent turn as a dying matriarch clinging to the English estate she was born on and still owns, independent of her officious businessman husband (Anthony Hopkins). But that central concern gets brushed aside by ungainly attempts to encompass everything else going on in the E.M. Forster novel of the same name. Emma Thompson does her sunny, spirited best to anchor things as Margaret Schlegel, a younger friend of Redgrave’s Mrs. Wilcox, who becomes more intimately linked to the Wilcox family after the older woman’s death. Yet too many spokes jut out from that center: Margaret’s sister (Helena Bonham Carter), whose own connection to the Wilcoxes is detailed in the largely unnecessary opening; Leonard Bast (Samuel West), a clerk who befriends the the Schlegels; Bast’s wife (Nicola Duffett), who harbors yet another connection to the Wilcox clan. It’s all eventually connected in narrative terms, but to little thematic satisfaction. Director James Ivory of course brings a certain handsomeness to the proceedings—though nothing is as entrancing as the opening shot of the train of Redgrave’s dress slipping through grass as she wanders about the grounds of Howards End. Overall, this is an uneven work of adaptation. (Screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala managed much better with her script for The Remains of the Day, drawn from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, also directed by Ivory and starring Thompson and Hopkins, and released the following year.)
