The Great Movies III

They made high-end films with low-end budgets, which gave them freedom from studio interference, and they often began with novels by such as Henry James and E. M. Forster that had the advantage of being out of copyright. Actors would reduce their fees to work with them, knowing Oscar nominations were likely, and indeed Emma Thompson was named best actress for her performance here as Margaret, and both Thompson and Anthony Hopkins, who plays Henry, were nominated for The Remains of the Day.

There was a tendency in some circles to condescend to MerchantIvory and their lifelong writing partner, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. "The Laura Ashley school of filmmaking," sniffed the British director Alan Parker, to which Merchant cheerfully responded: "That is a comment that will last longer than his films."

Because they often began with literary novels, because they often made period pieces, because the art direction was rich with sumptuous costumes and seductive locations, because, as Rita Kempley wrote in the Washington Post, "If Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala have anything to do with it, there'll always be an England," there was a tendency to think you knew what to expect when you went to a MerchantIvory.

Whether that was what you got depended on how attentive you were. Howards End, based on the I9I0 novel by Forster, is a film seething with anger, passion, greed, and emotional violence. That the characters are generally well behaved says less about their manners than their inhibitions. That's where the two conversations between Margaret and Henry come into play. Listen to them, and you have the underlying method of the film.

In the first, the widowed Henry (Hopkins) proposes marriage to Margaret Schlegel (Thompson). They met while his wife, Ruth Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave), was still alive, and Henry knows, but Margaret does not, that in a note scrawled on her deathbed, Ruth asked that her family home, Howards End, be left to Miss Schlegel. The note is crumpled and thrown into the fire, but Margaret becomes the mistress of the house after all, through marriage.

Henry shows Margaret through another of his houses, filled with portraits of the ancestors of the previous owners; she kindly says one "rather looks" like Henry. The tour is in the nature of a sales pitch, to underline his wealth and position. Then, awkwardly pausing on the stairs, Henry asks her: "Do you think you could be induced to share ... I mean, is it at all possible ..."

"Oh, yes, I see," Margaret says.

"I am asking you to be my wife."

"Yes, I know."

She kisses him. Are they in love? He is middle aged and she, while younger, is old to be single. They are middle class, he from the high middle, she from the center. Their families were neighbors in London. The marriage makes sense, is one way to put it.

The conversation displays Henry at his most awkward: he is a rigid man of conventional public principles, shy about personal matters, inclined to speak a little loudly and distinctly, as if his listeners might be deaf. Hopkins often has him bending forward from the waist and addressing people from a slightly oblique angle, as if keeping his options open. Thompson's Margaret, however, is a modern woman, raised in a GermanBritish family where literature and music were important; she looks people in the eye, says what she thinks, is not slow to get the point.

Their strategies for addressing the world come into play during a crisis at their wedding. To set the scene, I must introduce Leonard Bast (Samuel West), who at a lecture on Beethoven has the misfortune of picking up an umbrella belonging to Margaret's high-spirited younger sister, Helen (Helena Bonham Carter).

Returning the umbrella, he is asked to tea by the Schlegels and learns secondhand that Henry thinks he should quit his job as a clerk at a firm that is "about to go smash." He quits his job, the company prospers, and he is unable to keep another job for long. Bast and his wife, Jacky (Nicola Duffett), descend into poverty and hunger, and the idealistic Helen blames it all on Henry's bad advice. "We owe Mr. Bast," she believes, although Henry is philosophical: "The poor are poor. One is sorry for them, but there it is."

The rebellious Helen brings Leonard and Jacky along when she attends Margaret's marriage to Henry, at a lavish garden party in Shropshire. The Basts are literally starving; taking Marie Antoinette's advice, they eat cake. Jacky makes good use of the punch bowl, gets drunk, and recognizes her old friend Henry. "Do you know Henry?" she's asked. "Know Henry! Who doesn't know Henry? He's had some gay old times."

Jacky is dragged away, but the furious Henry accuses Margaret of setting a trap, and "releases her" from her engagement. No need: "It's not going to trouble us," Margaret tells him. And then James Ivory embarks on a series of conversations, each one ending in a fade to black, where Henry apologizes and apologizes, and Margaret tries to calm him.