Reading through the publicity material for the new movie of Brideshead Revisited, there is almost no mention of the 1981 television masterpiece. The blurb has the resolutely chirpy tone of the slightly mad, as if everyone working on this film has been brainwashed into denying the elephant in the room, forbidden to ask the question that will be first on the lips of every member of their audience: why re-make the most successful screen adaptation in television history as a movie? Why revisit Brideshead?
Director Julian Jarrold's answer seems to be that he is offering a different take on the book from the television series. Given the hostility that this film is likely to face, I thought we might break with tradition and try to be fair: judged on its own merits, this film is really not bad.
It succeeds, to some measure, in being different to the television series, and those differences are the best thing about it. Apart from the obvious change in pace (two hours instead of 13), the new Brideshead gives more space to Julia, makes more of the love triangle between Sebastian, Charles and Julia and focuses much more on the religious aspect. These are the right decisions.
In descending order of success, Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) is less attractive, more delicate, more troubled and darker than Anthony Andrews was; he is a better actor, and better cast. Hayley Atwell is a watchable Julia and Matthew Goode is a decent Charles Ryder - although perhaps rather too similar to Jeremy Irons.
On the less positive side, Emma Thompson is not convincing as Lady Marchmain - too silver-haired, too Cruella de Vil - and Michael Gambon barely registers as her estranged husband. There are some seriously bad cameos: Greta Scacchi unveils the worst Italian accent in the history of the world as Marchmain's mistress Cara; Joseph Beattie offers a bad Anthony Blanche impression as Anthony Blanche, who this time kisses Sebastian full on the lips at each encounter.
Overall, it is a glossy, determinedly "classy" movie, which looks good but would have done better to be bolder. The original television series was so thorough - it essentially went through all the direct speech in the novel - that each line that makes it into this version seems to remember a moment in the last. Someone should have realised that their only hope was to depart further, and attempt to remodel rather than revisit. Why, for example, must it be Castle Howard again?
The best bits are the new bits. There is a wonderful scene at the masqued ball in Venice where Charles Ryder kisses Julia and is spotted by Sebastian: this works well as a trigger for the breakdown of Charles and Sebastian's friendship, and brings the love triangle into a more dramatic balance. Later, when Sebastian is drunk and miserable at Brideshead, he bursts in to Julia's coming out ball and causes a scene, which is also new and effective (although bordering on the unsubtle with Sebastian's silly line: "All you ever wanted was to sleep with my sister!") There are other powerful moments: after Charles comes back from his unsuccessful trip to Morocco to bring back Sebastian to Brideshead, there is a three-second scene of Charles standing with Lady Marchmain and saying only, "I'm sorry" - nothing more is needed.
Why couldn't we have had more of that rigour? In between these moments of life there are whole passages of reverential superficiality. It is as if the new team had good ideas and plenty of talent but didn't dare tackle their material with both hands.
Most specifically, the treatment of the Catholic faith is heavy-handed and somewhat jarring. It is true that the novel is really about Catholicism, and that it is a shortcoming of the original series that not enough was made of it. But this does not mean, as appears to be the case here, that the faith of the Marchmains is the villain of the piece.
Right from the first glimpse of the chapel, with the family gathering around a statue of the Virgin in prayer, we are invited to see something sinister about it. Lady Marchmain, instead of charming and manipulative, here becomes the wicked high priestess of a baffling faith. The emphasis on "guilt", and Julia's return to her faith upon her father's death, mean that the "invisible thread" that ties them all together is blamed for the tragedy that follows. "I've already seen God ruin Sebastian," Charles says, "must He now ruin our lives too?" - and the rest of the film agrees with him.
Where is the nuance that makes Waugh's depiction of a particular brand of English Catholicism so powerful? Where is the sense of Charles's frustration that he doesn't understand, instead of only his pounding rationalism? Where is the mystery and order of the Marchmains' world, which in the novel is so much part of Charles's attraction to them? The new Brideshead is almost really good, but it doesn't dare to develop its new ideas. It packs only half a punch. |
