BEFORE: I'm just a few days away from the Hitchcock chain, and I've now got a choice to make - do I stick with the plan and watch his crime/suspense films throughout May and early June, or should I watch Anthony Hopkins in "Thor: The Dark World" and transition to sci-fi and comic-book films from there? Perhaps I should save all of the comic-book movies for July, right before Comic-Con, but if I do that, why not save Hitchcock for October? I guess outside of "Psycho" and "The Birds" his films don't really read as "Halloween" to me, so that doesn't quite work. But then, what will I watch when October rolls around, "World War Z" and maybe another zombie movie or two? I've got to lay this all out on a calendar and see where things are going to land...
In the meantime, Hopkins carries over from "Shadowlands".
THE PLOT: A businessman thwarts his wife's bequest of an estate to another woman.
AFTER: Sure enough, I fell asleep about halfway through this one, and I had to keep waking myself up and rewinding to the last thing I remembered. Eventually I was able to stay awake enough to finish it - which was good because I had a contractor coming to look at the leak in our roof today, so after a few naps during the film and then a few hours of real sleep, I was able to be awake in time.
And this film is all about real estate - oh, sure, it seems like it's going to be about relationships in Edwardian London, but all of those people need to live somewhere, and over time it seems like everyone wants to live at Howards End, at one point or another. I suppose you can say it's about class struggle - if you're doing a book report, Howards End represents England, and the debate symbolically rages over who's going to control England: the aristocracy, the middle class, or the working class? The poor, of course, have no shot, so they're barely mentioned at all.
The Wilcoxes are the "old money", and Howards End is like their summer home. A brief romance between teenagers puts them in contact with the Schlegels, a pair of middle-class sisters and their brother. Mrs. Wilcox and Mrs. Schlegel become fast friends, and the first hour of the film is a lot of their social engagements, tea parties and outings and such. (this is the boring part...)
Things get more interesting when Mrs. Wilcox takes ill, and leaves the property to Mrs. Schlegel, rather than her husband and children, who simply cannot make do by living in one of their many other houses, so they conspire to hide the amended will and keep Howards End. Yet none of them ever get around to actually living there, instead they rent it out to...Mrs. Schlegel (that'll teach her, charge her rent for the property that's rightfully hers...).
Then bone-headed Mr. Wilcox does something even dumber - he marries Schlegel, so now by community property, she ends up owning half of the house that she should have inherited in the first place. The Wilcoxes seem to be appallingly bad at keeping her out of this house. Perhaps it was just meant to be.
There are plenty more twists along the way, I'm just mentioning the ones that happened to stick with me. Secret romances, long-hidden affairs, some sort of insider trading (?), and an attempt to help out a few members of the working class that actually make their situation worse. This is probably more entertaining if you're a member of the Republican Party who supports trickle-down economics, which allegedly work if you just give it enough time, and let the upper class hold on to the money in the meantime.
In that sense, the film is sort of similar to a British version of "Les Miserables", only set 100 years later. The characters struggle to rise above their stations, but this proves to be quite difficult, as the rich keep getting richer and the poor just keep sinking lower.
Also starring Emma Thompson (last heard in "Brave"), Helena Bonham Carter (last seen in "Dark Shadows"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "A Man For All Seasons"), Samuel West (last seen in "Hyde Park on Hudson"), Prunella Scales, James Wilby, Joseph Bennett, Jemma Redgrave, Nicola Duffett, with a cameo from Simon Callow (last seen in "Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls").
RATING: 5 out of 10 umbrellas
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