Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Overstaying
at Brideshead
(Brideshead Revisited, 8/18/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
There
may be more daunting tasks than making a movie out of Evelyn Waugh's
parlor-elegy Brideshead Revisited, but not many. As those on
the wrong side of forty may recall, there was an 11-hour miniseries
version on PBS in 1981, featuring Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, and
a young unknown named Jeremy Irons. That program offered a degree of
subtlety and richness that did full justice to Waugh's book, and was
arguably one of the best things ever put on TV. Competing with that
definitive version—and doing it in the unavoidably truncated form
of a feature film—not only seems thankless, but hopeless.
The story concerns one Charles Ryder
(Matthew Goode), an aspiring painter without connections or family.
He overcomes these deficiencies when he goes up to college at Oxford
and meets Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), a notorious carouser and (it
turns out) extravagantly gay scion of the aristocratic Marchmain family.
Sebastian adopts Charles as his new best friend, introducing him to
a world of wealth and privilege epitomized by opulent Brideshead castle.
Compared to the lonely Charles, Sebastian has a surplus of family, including
his sticky-wicket brother Bridie (Ed Stoppard), black-sheep sister Julia
(Hayley Atwell) and the formidable Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), a
mother whose rigid Catholicism has alienated her husband (Michael Gambon)
and all her children. Sebastian loathes them all except for Julia. Charles,
whose gay credentials seem shaky, inconveniently finds himself attracted
to her, too.
Naturally, a two-hour script must
jettison much of the nourishing detail in Waugh's book. Like Joe Wright's
recent version of Atonement, this Brideshead pares the
story down to an awkward triangle of filial and romantic love between
two siblings and an outsider. What's left depends critically on how
compelling the three principals seem.
It only takes one weak leg to topple
a three-legged stool. As the neediest, most vulnerable character, Sebastian
was already the hardest sell, and comes off worst here. In the miniseries,
Anthony Andrews was flamboyant, and definitely odd, but not to the extent
of being crudely light-in-the-jodhpurs. Whishaw's prone, swishy performance
renders him more pathetic than sympathetic—where Waugh wanted to
tell a story of the consolations and sacrifices of faith, family, and
wealth, Whishaw just comes off as a spoiled, whining wuss. With a hundred
rooms in the castle and a thousand acres of estate to wander, couldn't
Sebastian find some way to avoid his frigid Mum? Indeed, so broad is
Whishaw, he doesn't enrich Waugh's story, but pulls it down by seeming
to vindicate its antiquated psychology (domineering Mother + distant
Father = homosexuality).
Goode fares better as Charles. A
sly operator who shows his bemusement mostly with his eyes, Goode flirts
with, yet never owns up to, the basic opportunism of his character.
Like the talented Mr. Ripley but without the homicides, he's a toxic
tourist, destroying what he admires merely by his presence. Aside from
him, no one else gets enough screen time to make an impression. Only
a matronly Emma Thompson brings something deeper—a kind of personal
inflexibility that seems to afflict her as much as her family—to
the story.
The new Brideshead is indeed
gorgeous to look at, impeccably staged and presented in the Masterpiece
Theatre-Merchant/Ivory tradition of quality. But none of that answers
the basic question of why the filmmakers thought it important to tell
this story again, now. The movie is not bad, actually. It just feels
like a case where the warm-up band shows up after the headliners have
already played, packed their instruments, and left the building.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog