Howards End 4K (1992) Ultra HD 2160p REMUX

Margaret Schlegel is a flighty yet compassionate middle-class intellectual whose friendship with the dying wife of rich capitalist Henry Wilcox commences an intricately woven tale of money, love, and death that encompasses the country's highest and lowest social echelons.

Howards End 4K (1992) Ultra HD 2160p REMUX Review
Encounter of three social classes of England at the beginning of the 20th century : the Victorian capitalists (the Wilcoxes) considering themselves as aristocrats, whose only god is money ; the enlightened bourgeois (the Schlegels), humanistic and philanthropic ; and the workers (the Basts), fighting to survive. The Schlegel sisters' humanism will be torn apart as they try both to softly knock down the Wilcox's prejudices and to help the Basts.

This is one of the finest films ever made, a testament to director James Ivory's unique sensitivity and genius. Of course, he started with a great novel by E. M. Forster, which always helps. But the screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvlala does it complete justice, as was always the case with her magnificent writing for the screen. I recently watched this again for the first time in years. My seeing performances of this story began with a London stage production long ago, where Gemma Jones was so brilliant in the role of the younger Schlegel sister played here by Helena Bonham Carter. This tale is so powerful and dramatic that it lends itself to novel, stage, and screen with equal facility. The story is bitingly, savagely critical of the hypocrisy and social injustice of England a century ago. This film's luminous centre is given it from the very first opening travelling shot, where Vanessa Redgrave is seen and followed as she roams in the twilight through her beloved garden at her house Howard's End, which she had inherited from her brother who died, and where she was born. Ivory avoids needless lighting, and we can barely make her out sometimes as she looks lovingly upon the flowers, the tree branches, and smells the redolent air, taking in the scents of early night. She stands outside looking into the drawing room through the open bow window, and is absorbing the adored atmosphere of the home she loves above all else in the world. Although she dies rather early in the film, Redgrave, as Ruth Wilcox, is radiant, mystical, supernatural in her mysterious performance, and she gives that inescapable tone of an underlying reality, of a concealed fate, beneath the surface of events, which make this film so utterly magical. All of the major performances are sensationally brilliant. Anthony Hopkins is so convincing as a crisp, matter-of-fact man of business who is in denial of all deeper feelings. Emma Thompson is at her most glorious as the infectiously irreverent and joyously alive older sister to the more serious Helena Bonham Carter. But in their scenes together they convey the carefree and heedless sisterliness of a joyful and playful household, they chatter together like magpies who have known each other since birth, they play, they joke, they romp, and truly they have captured on film exactly what such people could be like in those days. I knew groups of sisters like that as late as the 1960s and even the 1970s, before that terminal social decay set in, which destroyed all real joy in people's home lives and eradicated all such spontaneity and innocent fun in the drawing room. Every scene of this film reeks of authenticity and screams out: 'I'm really happening!' Or at least: 'Such things happened once!' Every scene of this film is composed so perfectly, the costumes are so exquisite, the art direction and production design are sensational beyond even the words of E. M. Forster to describe. The music is chosen so sensitively. Every breath is choreographed in this sumptuous spectacle of a lost world. As you watch this, you keep thinking: there is only one James Ivory. And he truly is an ivory in the lapidary sense, for he and everything he touches are carved by the gods.