Howards End

Kenneth Lonergan’s four-part miniseries, which arrives Sunday on Starz, is its own masterpiece, visually lavish and narratively restrained. Lonergan and the director Hettie Macdonald find something profound in the story’s clash of cultures between the liberal, bourgeois Schlegels and the emotionally repressed, establishment Wilcoxes that feels vital in this particular moment.

Howards End is fun. It’s lean. It illustrates from the get-go that the Oscar-winning writer behind one of the biggest cinematic downers in recent memory (“Manchester By the Sea”) can write “heartwarming” as well as he writes “heart-wrenching.” But it also shows that he understands fundamental principles essential to the original story and its modern telling.

Lonergan's gift for empathizing with characters while clearly seeing their flaws fills every scene with rich, unsentimental emotion. Lonergan's work is matched by director Hettie MacDonald, who, rather than leaning on handsome production design and costumes, makes the material feel immediate, and the characters' choices full of risk. ... The cast more than rises to the occasion.

A literate and visually sumptuous feast. [2 Apr - 15 Apr 2018, p.10]

Though Howards End (premiering April 8 at 8 p.m. on Starz) doesn’t have the ardor of the network’s Outlander, fans of that time-traveling romance may still find themselves swooning at the gracefully restrained emotion between Meg and stuffy Mr. Wilcox (Matthew Macfadyen).

Dissecting people--and classes, and ideas--is all that Howards End is interested in. It does so beautifully, with intellectual precision and an able and charismatic cast, but also with a clinical, not-quite-ironic distance. It’s an easy story to enjoy and admire, and a very difficult story to love wholeheartedly.

A beauty to behold but an ice cube to hold, this Howards End never quite thaws.