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Email to FriendBrideshead film is beautiful, but banal
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
Director: Julian Jarrold
Writers: Andrew Davies, Jeremy Brock
Cast: Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Hayley Atwell, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon
Rating: PG-13
Running: 145 minutes
Brideshead Revisited, as anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel or reveled in PBS' 11-segment series knows, is as much about religion as about a time and place (England between two ghastly world wars). The religious theme, like others in the film version of Brideshead Revisited, remains superficial. The result is beautiful but banal.
Brideshead is a magnificent pile of stately stone, home to the Flytes, including dissolute Sebastian and conflicted Julia. Lady Marchmain, a mother unbending who speaks in the "familial we," defined her children with dogma. Try as they will to unknot the rosary beads, they cannot. The story is told in flashback, through and by Charles Ryder, an unpedigreed "painter from Paddington," who falls for Sebastian at Oxford.
Sebastian takes Charles to Brideshead, where Charles also falls for the house and Julia. What, he wonders hungrily, does he have to do to bite this upper crust? Charles is an outsider in class and religion: Although once Church of England, he is now an atheist, which he declares at table – and him in flannels, not tails! – where Lady Marchmain presides, a verger's prod where her spine should be.
"You're not one of us," she decides. She says they are heathens, but Sebastian contradicts: "I am a sinner, cast out from God's love."
Unfortunately, Director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) doesn't quite know what to do with Waugh's religious wars over guilt and forgiveness. Neither do writers Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, who may have hoped that an audience's Anglophilia would glaze the clumsy dialogue.
On the other hand, "Brideshead" is beautiful. The house against the tumbling sky, dust cloths flying off hall statues like scarves off catwalk models (or off Elvis in his last years), the tuxes and polished wood and parterres, the cars, Charles drenched in the rain of sun in Morocco – scenes like these brocade the movie.
Would that the acting compared. As Charles, Matthew Goode does little but moon. Ben Whishaw defines Sebastian mostly through clichés of dypsomania and homosexuality. Emma Thompson does what she can with the script's version of Lady Marchmain; she commands the camera in a way the younger actors never manage. Michael Gambon is stuck with Lord Marchmain in Venice and on his Brideshead deathbed.
Hayley Atwell, given the role of Julia, hands it back. Only at her father's absolution does Atwell strut her stuff as an actress, and then it's too late because, on top of every other banality, Brideshead Revisited is way too long.
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