Howards End had a happy ending – for the upper crust, at least: episode four review
It’s rare to find a happy ending that’s sincere without being sickly, but the sun-dappled finale of BBC One’s excellent Howards End pulled it off.
The final episode opened with one of the many deft scenes that made you root for the unlikely relationship between the bohemian Margaret Schlegel (Hayley Atwell) and buttoned-up, twinkly eyed chauvinist Henry Wilcox (Matthew Macfadyen). In a strained scene at breakfast, Margaret finally convinced Henry that she wasn’t that bothered by a long-ago affair. There was a wonderful moment as he stopped harrumphing and softened his expression and gazed lovingly at his then fiancée over his beard – a piece of facial hair with such absolute conviction it deserves a Bafta in its own right.
For the story to run its course, it wasn’t enough for Mr Wilcox to soften: he had to break. Published in 1910, Howards End captured the tensions between tradition and modernity, at a time when the suffragette movement redefined women’s roles. Rather than bashing us over the head with these themes, they seeped into the background and lent it its colour, glimpsed every time a motor car growled past a horse-drawn carriage, or a well-meaning man insisted on helping the vigorous Margaret to walk on a pavement. It was like Downton Abbey for grown-ups.
If there was one thing to push Henry and his new marriage to breaking point, it was sexual hypocrisy; in this case, his cold reaction to Helen Schlegel’s (Philippa Coulthard) pregnancy with the child of doe-eyed clerk Leonard Bast (Joseph Quinn). Atwell played these climactic scenes superbly, from Margaret’s protectiveness towards her sister Helen that was both vulpine and tender, to the confrontation where she skewered her husband for refusing to give Helen shelter at Howards End. Their fault had been the same, she suggested, but “you have had only pleasure. She may die.” Strong feelings, crisply expressed: this has been a fine and largely faithful homage to EM Forster.
After a cathartic sob on his garden bench, Henry saw sense. The couple were reconciled, and Helen calmed down to raise her child at Howards End, these two strains of upper-crust Englishness softening to meet in the middle. Forster’s optimistic ending only went so far, mind: in his world, it’s all very well to stray if you have a huge income and a bucolic bolthole, but less so if you’re lower middle class like poor Mr Bast, who ended up squashed beneath a bookshelf – a heavy symbol of his doomed aspirations.
There were too many outstanding performances – from Coulthard’s unabashed Helen to Alex Lawther’s deliciously useless Tibby – to do justice to here. Cinema was the natural home for great drama when the last major adaptation was released in 1992, a quaint, distant age before the era of box sets and online streaming binges. The BBC’s series showed yet again how the small screen is now lord of the manor.
