The pinnacle of the decades-long collaboration between director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, Howards End is a thought-provoking, luminous vision of E. M. Forster’s cutting 1910 novel about class divisions in Edwardian England. Emma Thompson won an Academy Award for her dynamic portrayal of Margaret Schlegel, a flighty yet compassionate middle-class intellectual whose friendship with the dying wife (Vanessa Redgrave) of rich capitalist Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) commences an intricately woven tale of money, love, and death that encompasses the country’s highest and lowest social echelons. With a brilliant, layered script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (who also won an Oscar) and a roster of gripping performances, Howards End is a work of both great beauty and vivid darkness, and one of cinema’s greatest literary adaptations.
Starring Emma Thompson, Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins, and Samuel West.
Notes: Thompson won an Academy Award for her performance. In 1910, Forster achieved his first major literary success with Howards End, considered by many critics to be his greatest novel. A symbolic exploration of the social, economic, and philosophical forces at work in England in the years before World War I, Howards End uses three families (the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and the Basts) to explore the competing idealism and materialism of the upper classes, and to explore the belittling effects of poverty on the human soul. A deft treatment of a large theme, Howards End won widespread acclaim upon its original publication, and established Forster as one of England’s most important writers–a reputation he would hold for the rest of his life, though after 1924 he lived for 46 years and never wrote another novel.
May be suitable for older children.
Parents need to know that this period drama set in Edwardian England features sexual affairs, deceit, class bias and an out of wedlock pregnancy; ok for older teens. – Common Sense Media