It isn’t at all a bad time for a new adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s
exquisite Brideshead Revisited. The BBC miniseries is over a
quarter-century old, and there’s never been a proper feature. The
homosexual content—never exactly disguised—can be overt
now, but we’re not so advanced that the crushing guilt that accompanies
it seems foreign. Meanwhile, Waugh’s simultaneous envy of and nostalgia
for the perfumed decadence of the English-Catholic aristocracy between
the wars seems especially poignant, poised as we are on the lip of
another recession.
Director Julian Jarrold was last responsible for the nauseating
Becoming Jane, and at first it looks as though he’s going to
handle Brideshead just as clumsily. This film, like the book, is
told from the perspective of Charles Ryder (slightly-too-old Matthew
Goode), an upper-middle-class striver completely out of his
depth—but the filmmakers don’t do enough to remind us that
Charles is our narrator. The voice-overs are scarce, the cinematography
(by Jess Hall) is square and pompous when it should be dazzling, and
the score (by Adrian Johnston) thunders when it should be stricken with
awe. Still, the acting is more nuanced than the screenplay for
Becoming Jane ever allowed. Soon we’re sucked into the life of
poor, desirous Charles, who goes up to Oxford to read history and finds
himself fraternizing with a flaming creature named Sebastian Flyte (Ben
Whishaw), whose idea of fun is snacking on plover eggs gathered by hand
at his ancestral home; lecturing his teddy bear, Aloysius; and getting
roaring drunk before noon.
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t linger at Oxford for long, and the
remaining point on the love triangle—Sebastian’s sister, Julia
(Hayley Atwell)—is always present, but only fleetingly
interesting. Whishaw makes a fantastic Sebastian, sympathetic yet
untouchable in his headlong dash into alcoholism, but Atwell has
exactly the wrong look for the part. Neither ethereal (with her
prosaic, heart-shaped face, she looks oddly like Neve Campbell) nor
distractingly physical (lumpy flapper dresses effectively disguise her
figure), Julia wilts next to her brother’s conflicted charisma. It’s
conceivable that Julia’s dullness is the film’s way of arguing that
Charles is homosexual, too. If that’s the case, the argument
fails—Goode has too much chemistry with Atwell.
