BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
Directed by Julian Jarrold
Written by Andrew Davies
and Jeremy Brock
Starring: Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Hayley Atwell
and Emma Thompson
Classification: 14A
***
The new movie of Brides-head Revisited should probably be called Brideshead Revisited Revisited. Inevitably, the movie takes place in the shadow of the 1981 television series that made a star out of Jeremy Irons and put author Evelyn Waugh's popularity back on the ascendant. Charles Sturridge's 11-part series remains a definitive fantasy of between-the-wars British aristocracy, the reckless young androgynous lovelies living lives of impossible privilege. In retrospect, the appeal of the series may have been a harbinger of the eighties enthusiasm for designer-label snobbery and conspicuous excess.
In a later apologetic preface to the 1945 novel, Waugh noted that, when he wrote the book, "It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster ... and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find
distasteful."
The movie version could be seen as a bit of a corrective to the series and novel, less opulent and a lot more to the point. Waugh said his novel was designed to show the effects of divine grace on a group of interconnected people. The movie is intended more as a simple, elegiac love story though director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane), along with Andrew Davis (Bridget Jones's Diary) and Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland), manages to pack a fair amount of the book's time-shifting narrative into its brisk 135 minutes.
As in Waugh's novel, the film is framed as the memoir of Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) stationed in a country estate, Brideshead, that has been seconded for the military's use. Charles, a military officer and professional architectural painter, had visited the estate years before. A middle-class non-entity, Charles was raised by his comically undemonstrative father (Patrick Malahide) before being sent up to Oxford. Almost instantly, he falls in with the fluttery, extravagant Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), the teddy bear-clutching, generally drunk centre of a group of sexually ambiguous dandies.
The story follows Ryder's relationships with Sebastian and subsequently with his cool, younger sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell), and the estate that represents their inherited privilege. As played by Wishaw (one of the Dylans in I'm Not There), Sebastian is openly gay and in love with Charles. The alluring Julia shares her brother's feelings, including, eventually, an attraction to Charles.
Complicating things is the presence of their mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), a devout Catholic and embittered abandoned wife whose husband (Michael Gambon) is living in Venice with his mistress (Greta Scacchi).
Lady Marchmain sends Charles, who she considers reliable, to Venice with her two children to visit their father. She hopes he'll be a stable influence, although instead his incipient affair with Julia tips the balance, sending Sebastian into full alcoholism.
The second Brideshead visit, many years later, brings Charles back into the family fold and a confrontation with Julia's gold-digging husband, Rex Mottram (Jonathan Cake). The character was Canadian in the novel, transposed here to an American but serving the same function as an ugly mirror to Charles's own venality.
Threaded through with ambivalence about class, religion and sexuality, Brideshead Revisited is overnuanced, a world of delicate cruelty, where most of the wounds take place without breaking the skin or even a sweat. There is one exception to the pattern: Emma Thompson's portrayal of Lady Marchmain, an aging woman who is both terrifying and vulnerable. She comes close to delivering what Waugh's book aimed to do: to make the viewer question his or her own irreligious complacency.
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