This weekend, a new restoration of “Howards End,” the 1992 Merchant Ivory adaptation of E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel, starring Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins, and Vanessa Redgrave, began screening at Film Forum and the Paris Theatre; it will be shown in other cities around the country in the coming weeks. Go see it. The new 4K print is gorgeous, the performances splendid. The actors seem to have been captured at a moment of particular glory. Forster’s story, about class and temperament in Edwardian England, centers on a beloved family house, Howards End, and its role in the fates of the intellectual, affectionate Schlegel sisters, Margaret (Thompson) and Helen (Bonham Carter); the Wilcoxes, a tough-minded industrialist (Hopkins) and his kind, sentimental wife (Redgrave); and the clerk Leonard Bast (Samuel West), who strives to improve himself, and his companion, Jacky (Nicola Duffett), who does not. In this strange and disturbing political season, a reconsideration of the Wilcoxes, the Schlegels, and the Basts—whose stories stir in us thoughts about pragmatism, good intentions, character, industry, poverty, and respect—somehow feels useful.

The director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant, in their three Forster adaptations (“A Room with a View” and “Maurice” are the others), two with their screenwriting partner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, achieved a balance of beauty and tone that made Forster’s works come richly and warmly alive. The films are beautiful to look at; they give your mind and soul much to work with as you stare, enraptured; they stick with you; and they act as enticements to read the novels, which offer broader and deeper pleasures, in the form of sentences that you will want to revisit again and again.

That’s what they did for me, anyway. Every summer, I reread a Forster novel or two, often by listening to an audiobook. (I recommend Nadia May, unabridged.) This summer, while I was listening to “Maurice” on vacation, a thought about Merchant Ivory hit me with a jolt. In a scene in which Maurice, our hero, and Clive, his first love, are discussing beauty, art, and desire, Maurice asks Clive when he first cared for him, and Clive says he loved his beauty first. “Clive, you’re a silly little fool, and since you brought it up I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen,” Maurice says. “I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you’re sitting in. I adore you.” This embarrasses Clive, who begins talking about Michelangelo.

He did not change the subject but developed it into another that had interested him recently, the precise influence of Desire upon our aesthetic judgments. “Look at that picture, for instance. I love it because, like the painter himself, I love the subject.”

What startled me was the thought that many of us fell for Forster, in the eighties and nineties, by watching Merchant Ivory movies, and desiring what we saw and heard—not just George Emerson (Julian Sands) in “A Room with a View,” with his declarations, passions, and question marks, or Scudder (Rupert Graves) in “Maurice,” nobly climbing a ladder into our hero’s bedroom, but every frock and sport coat dreamed up by the costumer Jenny Beavan, the vistas, the frescoes, the views, the wisteria at Howards End, Helena Bonham Carter’s intense gaze and giant cloud of hair, every line of dialogue. When people roll their eyes about Merchant Ivory, writing these films off as costume dramas or some similar foolishness, it annoys me. (Nick Hornby’s joke in “High Fidelity” about the lethal bookcase in “Howards End” annoys me too.) The Merchant Ivory Forster adaptations are beautiful to look at, and often concern love affairs in glorious countrysides. But they are not frivolous. They are enjoyable, which is not the same thing.

Lionel Trilling, in his 1943 book “E. M. Forster,” in which he called Forster “the only living novelist who can be read again and again,” and “who, after each reading,” gives us “the sensation of having learned something,” wrote, satisfyingly: 

It is Forster’s manner, no doubt, that prevents a greater response to his work. That manner is comic. . . . And nowadays even the literate reader is likely to be unschooled in the comic tradition and unaware of the comic seriousness. The distinction between the serious and the solemn is an old one, but it must be made here again to explain one of the few truly serious novelists of our time. Stendhal believed that gaiety was one of the marks of the healthy intelligence, and we are mistakenly sure that Stendhal was wrong. We suppose that there is necessarily an intellectual “depth” in the deep tones of the organ; it is possibly the sign of a deprivation—our suspicion of gaiety in art perhaps signifies an inadequate seriousness in ourselves. A generation charmed by the lugubrious—once in O’Neill, Dreiser, and Anderson, now in Steinbeck and Van Wyck Brooks—is perhaps fleeing from the trivial shape of its own thoughts.

I would like to embroider that on a pillow or a sweatshirt. (I might substitute other names for Steinbeck and Van Wyck Brooks.) In every Forster novel, we find delightful conversations, observations, affections, intimacies that we recognize, presented in ways we haven’t quite seen elsewhere; the Merchant Ivory movies re-create them beautifully—for example, the scene in “A Room with a View” where Freddy Honeychurch, at the piano, sings a clanging, whimsical song (“Strike the concertina’s melancholy string! Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything!”), and Cecil leaves the room. Watching this, we feel like a Honeychurch in a world of Cecils. In the book, Freddy feels that Cecil is “the kind of fellow who would never wear another fellow’s cap.” Trilling writes of Cecil that “culture for him is a way of hiding his embarrassment before life.” Forster is the opposite.

The pleasures of “Howards End” are soberer pleasures. Its ambition is greater, its social criticism more penetrating. The romances are more true to life, less mythic, more dispiriting. The Schlegels are interested in women’s suffrage, Beethoven, and helping the poor; Mr. Wilcox and his children are interested in making the world run, gruffly; Leonard Bast is trying to survive, and to nurture his soul. These stories, in collision, become tragic. We fall for the Schlegels because they’re good talkers, affectionate and sympathetic; a scene in which Leonard Bast goes to their London town house to retrieve his umbrella, which Helen took accidentally, after a concert, deftly shows how their manner—open, trusting, self-deprecating, neighborly, and joking at once—is itself a luxury made possible by education and financial security.

Some of the novel’s mysteries and motives are difficult to communicate onscreen: why, for example, after Mrs. Wilcox’s death, Margaret and Mr. Wilcox fall in love. The Wilcoxes are generally insensitive, but Margaret, capable of being both pragmatic and emotional, is inclined to see the good in them. In the book, passages like this help make sense of Mr. Wilcox’s appeal, such as it is.

“You are not as unpractical as you pretend. I shall never believe it.”

Margaret laughed. But she was—quite as unpractical. She could not concentrate on details. Parliament, the Thames, the irresponsive chauffeur. . . . It is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole. Mr. Wilcox saw steadily. He never bothered over the mysterious or the private. . . . Yet she liked being with him. He was not a rebuke, but a stimulus, and he banished morbidity. . . . He was so sure that it was a very pleasant world. His complexion was robust, his hair had receded but not thinned, the thick moustache and the eyes that Helen had compared to brandy-balls had an agreeable menace in them, whether they were turned towards the slums or towards the stars.

Later, determined to help him nurture his neglected soul, Margaret makes her way toward her big idea—Only connect!—which has since become nearly synonymous with Forster. What is less often invoked is what follows it.

She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. . . .

But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared, however much she reminded herself of it: his obtuseness. He simply did not notice things, and there was no more to be said. He never noticed that Helen and Frieda were hostile, or that Tibby was not interested in currant plantations; he never noticed the lights and shades that exist in the greyest conversation, the finger-posts, the milestones, the collisions, the illimitable views.

When she scolds him about it, he laughs and says, “My motto is Concentrate. I’ve no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing.” “It isn’t frittering away the strength,” she says. “It’s enlarging the space in which you may be strong.”

There are many such discussions of complexity and simplification in the book, creating a context in which its bold, somewhat overdetermined plot makes a deeper kind of sense than it does in the film. “Howards End,” the Merchant Ivory version, necessarily connects its plot points much faster, and must leave out many of Forster’s discussions and ruminations. But Thompson’s warmhearted, thoughtful portrayal of Margaret (she won an Oscar for it) goes a long way toward indicating what’s elided.

In an election year, many of us feel like a Schlegel in a world of Wilcoxes—observing everything, considering it, feeling passionate about it, and then being steamrolled by the obtuse, who don’t even seem to be paying attention. In 2016, “Howards End” and E. M. Forster generally are a balm for the mind and the soul. Watching the Merchant Ivory adaptations and reading the novels can help restore sanity. And when we return to our present-day lives, after experiencing this bolstering of the spirits, we—unlike the Schlegel sisters—can vote.

 Sarah Larson is a roving cultural correspondent for newyorker.com. MORE