[size=3]I must confess, I have not read Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel "Brideshead Revisited" nor have I seen the legendary television mini-series based on it. Thus I attended director [b]Julian Jarrold[/b]'s new feature-film adaptation as a Brideshead virgin. My… More
[size=3]I must confess, I have not read Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel "Brideshead Revisited" nor have I seen the legendary television mini-series based on it. Thus I attended director [b]Julian Jarrold[/b]'s new feature-film adaptation as a Brideshead virgin. My conclusion: I don't know what all the fuss has been about.[/size]
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/67/Brideshead_revisited.jpg[/img]
[size=3]I found the film, starring [b]Ben Whishaw[/b] as a gay libertine cast out of the British aristocracy and [b]Emma Thompson[/b] as his authoritarian mother, to be not much more than soap opera. It reeks of television, and not the best television of the year. (Jarrold is a long-time television director who began directing feature films only a few years ago. Once a TV director always a TV director, I suppose.) [/size]
[size=3]There are elements that hint at how much better the film could have been, especially the performance from Whishaw, which at times has very rich, deep resonances. But every other performance, particularly the painfully shallow one from co-star [b]Matthew Goode [/b]as the aristocrat's bourgeois love interest, is television-thin. Even Ms. Thompson is two-dimensional as the icy matron. [/size]
[size=3]It would be a compliment to say that Goode's performance was two-dimensional; I'd describe it as zero-dimensional. Not for a second did I understand why his character was drawn to the ultra-fey aristocrat. Either Goode is incapable of exhibiting passion, or he got terrible advice from the director. Later in the film, Goode's character shifts his attention to the aristocrat's sister; here again he's as cold as a fish. Goode is just horrendous.[/size]
[size=3]In one of the most brutally hilarious turns of phrase I've seen in a movie review this year, A.O. Scott writes the following of Goode: "Mr. Goode shows all the charisma of a stalk of boiled asparagus molded into the likeness of Jeremy Irons." Irons originated the role in the 1980s mini-series. [/size]
[size=3][Quote from New York Times, July 25.][/size]
[img]http://stylebubble.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/05/02/bhscreenshot2.jpg[/img]
[size=3]I'm certain that the novel was revolutionary in its time, brazenly defying the rule that homosexuality was never to be mentioned. But homophobia has been so thoroughly undermined since then, that such content now is more quaint than defiant. Contemporary filmmakers have no difficulty depicting old-time racism in a way that captures the terror. But depictions of old-time homophobia always seem oddly faint, like a dream we can only vaguely remember. The drama does not come through. It certainly does not in this version of "Brideshead."[/size]
[size=3]But homophobia is not the core of the story. Whishaw's character, Sebastian, is not just terrorized because he's gay. He's at odds with his mother in all sorts of ways. Sebastian's heterosexual sister (played adequately by [b]Hayley Atwell[/b]) is also tormented by the mother, and the sister's life is destroyed almost as completely as Sebastian's. The root of the problem is Mum's tyrannical approach to everything. [/size]
[img]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/graphics/2008/05/29/ftbrides129.jpg[/img]
[size=3]For some strange reason, Waugh made the mother an arch-Catholic, and Catholicism plays a central role in the story (at least it does in this film version). Every time the mother's religious devotion is brought up, the audience is reminded that she's not just a Christian but a [i]Catholic[/i] Christian. The word "Catholic" appears almost 50 times in the screenplay, and each time it was uttered I winced. I could not understand the point of continually drawing attention to the [i]denomination[/i] to which the mother subscribed. I felt I was watching a 1930s film about Jews. Catholics are presented as a strange type of person set apart from others -- their own species.[/size]
[size=3]From what I've read, Waugh actually converted to Catholicism, which surprises me because the screenplay reads like an anti-Catholic screed. Waugh perhaps had as much strange psychological baggage bound up with religion as Mel Gibson does today. That would no doubt interest Waugh's psychoanalyst, but it doesn't make the man's fiction interesting. It makes it strange and overwrought (like Gibson's movies).[/size]
[size=3]Putting the weird Catholic theme aside, perhaps the suffocating emotional quality of this family was intended to be a metaphor for the dying out of Britain's aristocracy and the complete triumph of the bourgeoisie, with Goode's character representing the upper middle class. If so, that kind of symbolism strikes me as thick and ponderous. It doesn't say much to me about life or history. Perhaps in more talented hands than Julian Jarrold's it might have.[/size]
[size=3]I for the most part put my disappointments aside while watching the film and tried just to enjoy the soap opera, which was engaging. (Will Sebastian ever find love? Will he come back to England before his mother dies?) I also reveled in t[/size][size=3]he gorgeousness of the production. The costumes are other-worldly, and the great mansion where much of the film was shot will give you goose bumps. It made me dream of the 18th century. [/size]
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[size=3]The most meaningful thing about this film by far is [b]Ben Whishaw[/b], whom I first saw in the wildly innovative and terribly overlooked "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" (2006). Whishaw recently completed filming on a project where he plays Romantic poet John Keats opposite Abbie Cornish, another stunning new talent. The film's tentative title is "Bright Star" and was directed by Jane Campion ("The Piano"). It is due for a 2009 release. I cannot wait for it.[/size]