Howards End: Yes, it's a beautiful film, but is it art?

After languishing on my to-be-seen heap of dvd's, I finally got around to watching this one. Having picked up the Best Picture Oscar for 1992, I thought I was going to be in for some scintilliating acting (after all, it has four Oscar winners in the cast) and some serious period drama -- you usually can?t go wrong with the Merchant-Ivory team of movie makers.

And I was --

Disappointed. Oh, the costumes were gorgeous, the sets magnificent, the little details and cinematography of flowers and trees and the English countryside intoxicating. But there was just one little thing that's lacking in this film -- emotion.

That can be trouble in most films. But in a film of this caliber and especially in adaptations of period works and novels, it can be fatal; the audience is held at arm?s length throughout, with the only times that emotion is let through the results tend to be disasterous. The only character in this who shows the slightest bit of maturity is Emma Thompson in the role of Margaret Schlegel, artistic and intelligent, with a younger brother in university and her sister, Helen (Helena Bonham-Carter, looking particularly waif-like) being interested as her sister is in the arts and education. But where Helen differs from her siblings is that she is determined to change the world.

Along the way, Margaret befriends the frail Mrs. Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave) who is wed to a wealthy businessman, (Anthony Hopkins), who is rigidly aware of his caste, and lives in the trappings of luxury with his equally snobby children. But Mrs. Wilcox senses a kindred spirit in the artistic Meg and her family, and as she lays dying scrawls out a codicil to her will that Margaret is to have her home, Howards End.

It's this piece of property that causes the main drive of the plot, along with Helen's own befriending of the poor clerk Leonard Bast (Sam West) and his very much lower class wife. All of these lives intersect and the film creeps towards the ending which ends in tragedy as England hurtles towards the first world war.

It might be a beautiful adaptation of the E.M. Forester novel, but the pace is mind-numbingly slow. Only the two sisters seem to have any sort of life to them, and Bast, caught up in the machinations of Helen to better himself is ruthlessly -- and literally crushed -- by the Wilcox family. The rest of the characters are utterly forgettable and by the end I was glad to have the film over.

If you?re interested in the social commentary of Edwardian England, or the style of the times, then you might enjoy this film. Otherwise I would suggest that you bypass this one and move on to something else.