“Brideshead Revisited,” Julian Jarrold’s strenuously picturesque adaptation of the novel by Evelyn Waugh, conducts a whirlwind tour of the quadrangles of Oxford and the canals of Venice, always returning to the grand country house of the title, impersonated with lapidary dignity by Castle Howard. At Brideshead, Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), a young man with artistic ambition and no special pedigree, falls under the spell of an aristocratic Roman Catholic family, conceiving first a “romantic friendship” with the dissolute, epicene younger son, Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), and then lusting, in his understated English way, after Sebastian’s sister Julia (Hayley Atwell).
It is impossible to avoid mentioning that this story has been told on screen before, in a mini-series that was broadcast on PBS in 1982 and that holds up remarkably well. That version had a cast of first-rate British actors, some of them already known to American audiences (Claire Bloom, Laurence Olivier) and others whose fame was about to take wing (notably Jeremy Irons, who played Charles). Mr. Jarrold’s rendition, with some fine British actors of its own, notably Michael Gambon and Emma Thompson as Sebastian and Julia’s estranged parents, is necessarily shorter and less faithful to Waugh’s book, and also, for what it’s worth, more cinematic. It is also tedious, confused and banal.
But first let’s look at the pretty pictures. The earlier adaptation was shot in a functional style that favored expository clarity over visual expressiveness. Mr. Jarrold, free of any such constraint, goes for tilted frames and asymmetrical, poetic compositions. The cinematographer, Jess Hall, renders Gothic interiors in a chiaroscuro as rich and smooth as béarnaise sauce. And the clothes, the accents, the accessories! Ah, yes. England between the wars. Storm clouds gathering on the horizon, old chap. Lots of smoking and tuxedo-wearing in the meantime.
It is not Mr. Jarrold’s fault that this landscape has been so heavily trodden over by others. But he and the screenwriters, Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, can be blamed for finding so little new or interesting to say about it, and for systematically stripping Waugh’s novel of its telling nuances and provocative ideas. His “Brideshead Revisited” focuses on Charles’s successive infatuations with Sebastian, whom he meets on his first day at Oxford, and then with Julia, whom he encounters during a summer visit to Brideshead. In both relationships Charles is both passive and opportunistic, masking his prurience and what Sebastian and Julia’s mother, Lady Marchmain, calls his “hunger” with an air of sympathy and good manners.
Charles is a complicated character, who causes a lot of trouble in the Flyte-Marchmain family even as he pretends to be a detached observer of its internal drama. The role calls for a mix of diffidence and magnetism — Charles is a shy, stoical seducer — but Mr. Goode shows all the charisma of a stalk of boiled asparagus molded into the likeness of Jeremy Irons. The film can’t explain why Julia or Sebastian would conceive a risky, tempestuous passion for Charles other than that Waugh seemed to think they might.
Mr. Whishaw, an able enough actor, falls into easy, caricatural indications of alcoholism and homouality, trembling and pouting and occasionally pulling himself into an attitude of doomed, fragile nobility. Ms. Atwell, by far the best thing about the film, manages to endow Julia, always the most enigmatic figure in the story, with a credible sense of internal conflict. Julia, like her mother, is headstrong and intelligent but, in large part because of her mother’s baleful influence, radically limited in her choices and chances.（）
About that mother. Ms. Thompson as usual is impeccable, but Lady Marchmain’s monstrosity betrays the weakness of Mr. Jarrold’s grasp of Waugh, or perhaps his high-minded intention to improve on the old master’s unfashionably reactionary and bothersomely contradictory views about society and religion. Lady Marchmain, in this “Brideshead,” is a nearly allegorical figure of religious fanaticism and rigid piety. Her pathological devotion to her faith is what drove away her husband and deformed her children.
Her dogmatism makes her Charles’s foil and provokes him, for once, to take a stand. At dinner he declares himself an atheist, and he and his hostess spar through clenched teeth over matters of the spirit. But the argument, as Mr. Jarrold stages it, carries no sense of intellectual conviction or historical context. It’s more like Dr. Seuss than Evelyn Waugh: The star-bellied sneetches had bellies with stars, and the plain-bellied sneetches had none upon thars.
In Waugh’s book — and, I’m compelled to add, that fine old mini-series it was made into — religious commitments and social relations were part of a thickly detailed, complicated and ancient lived reality. The long experience of English Catholics as a religious minority, the subtle gradations of class in the British university system, the crazy quilt of ual norms and taboos governing the lives of young adults: all of this is what makes “Brideshead Revisited” live and breathe as a novel. None of it registers with any force in this lazy, complacent film, which takes the novel’s name in vain.
“Brideshead Revisited” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some ual content.
