But none of this is acknowledged in the 2018 Howards End, despite the casting.

While the Schlegels are progressive types and could be expected to have a wide circle of friends, wouldn’t the upper-crust Wilcoxes be somewhat racist in the way of the times? For example, Charles Wilcox says, “Why be so polite to servants? They don’t understand it,” and that family doesn’t care much for the poor and the likes of Leonard Bast, so I rather expect they’d feel the same way about people of different races. Stripped of Emma Thompson’s sophisticated performance and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s elegant script, Margaret is merely a “hard” contrast to her “soft-hearted” sister Helen.Īt least Jacky looked historically accurate, as this 1900s photo of an unnamed African-American woman shows (from the Duke University collection). Wilcox and then is acquiescent to Henry Wilcox, as if her supposed free-thinking ways are just a pose that she’s happy to cast off when the right man comes along. Margaret pushes herself into friendship with Mrs. She becomes harshly pragmatic, caught between her shallow talk of social justice and her cravings for life’s comforts. Yes, Forster’s words are there, but rearranged to shortchange the character, IMO.

His greatest works tackled topics such as class, sex, and race not with sweeping pronouncements on how Things Should Be but with nuanced reflections on how societal change might affect interpersonal interactions for good and ill.Īt the heart of this lack of subtlety is the character of Margaret Schlegel, as written by Kenneth Lonergan and portrayed by Hayley Atwell. Forster was a Victorian writing in the 20th century, edging into modernity with poetry, not force. Tracey Ullman plays the Schlegels’ Aunt Juley, who is kind of a busybody, and wears the only interesting hats in the whole show.

The story of howards end