Falling in Love With Furniture in ‘Brideshead Revisited’
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No book-to-screen creative journey is likely to please every admirer of the original source material. The more one is attached to a novel, the more likely a film version will fall short of expectation. As Tom Teodorczuk observed in the July 18-20 New York Sun, Miramax’s characteristically ornate new film version of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel “Brideshead Revisited” is doubly handicapped as an adaptation.
Waugh’s best-selling novel is a revered (though by some accounts not by its author) example of Britain’s mid-20th-century literary golden age. Moreover, it was the basis for a Granada Television adaptation that was one of PBS’s most resounding successes when it made its debut stateside as part of the network’s “Great Performances” series in 1982. Indeed, the 11-hour television “Brideshead” became so instantly identified with PBS’s brand of imported upmarket Anglophilia that American viewers voted the program no. 7 among the best-loved editions of the network’s tent-pole “Masterpiece Theater” broadcasts, even though “Brideshead” was never aired as part of the slate.
Of course, 11 hours offer a lot more canvas on which to interpret a decade-spanning, 300-plus-page novel than the measly 135 minutes making up “Brideshead” 2008. This comparatively brisk running time has impelled the writers, Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, to ruthlessly eliminate and relocate characters and re-engineer the book’s timeline. Nevertheless, Miramax’s “Brideshead” echoes the television version at regular intervals.
As Charles Ryder, the actor Matthew Goode sets the narrative ball rolling through voice-over just as Jeremy Irons did a quarter-century ago. But Charles’s guilt-ridden internal monologue, delivered in the waning years of World War II as he walks the familiar hallways of the titular Flyte family estate now given over to the war effort, is something of a false start. Within moments, Brideshead Manor (played as in the original by Castle Howard in Yorkshire, England) gives way to a CGI ocean liner en route to England a few years before the war.
Charles’s army officer’s uniform becomes dinner clothes and we’re reintroduced to our narrator as a successful painter just back from a well-received debut in New York and a lengthy and fruitful artistic sabbatical in the Tropics.
“Make an effort, Charles,” his clearly ill-suited wife tells him, “you’re not in South America now, you’re among civilized people.” Little does Mrs. Ryder know that among the scrupulously well-behaved onboard throng is Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell), Charles’ long-lost muse. As the ship’s engines drone like a Bartók fugue, Charles, Julia, and the camera pursue one another through the passageways until, at least for a moment, the two lovers are adulterously united.
Hold that thought. We have still more time-traveling to do. Julia, it seems, is not the first Flyte to experience Charles’s affections. A decade prior to their fateful ocean crossing, Charles first fell under the spell of Julia’s brother, Sebastian (Ben Whishaw), as an underclassman at Oxford. “Sodomites, all of them,” Charles’s stuffy cousin warns the young man of Sebastian and his high-living, unrepentantly effete crowd. But the impossibly thin, puppy-dog-eyed, and effortlessly seductive Sebastian proves difficult to resist. Rendered motherless and an only child by fate and nearly fatherless by dint of his own father’s caustic personal remove, Charles finds in Sebastian a boy-man playmate with whom he can lower his guard.
When on impulse Sebastian whisks his new best friend off to the titular family manse in the Midlands, Charles is introduced to the two great loves over whom he will obsess for the rest of his life. The first is Julia, Sebastian’s sister. The second is Brideshead itself, a monument to the upper reaches of aristocratic wealth that the Ryder family cannot hope to reach any other way than by social invitation, or possibly marriage.
Naturally, the high-born family to which Brideshead has offered generations of ornate shelter is about as dysfunctional as they get. Sebastian and Julia’s mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), can barely disguise her toxic Machiavellian parenting instincts under a combination of proselytizing Catholic dogma and a gracefully unctuous patrician veneer. Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), who long since abandoned the gargantuan home and hearth in England for a sybaritic, bohemian existence in Venice is, on the other hand, an unrepentant sinner’s sinner.
Trapped between their larger-than-life parents’ polar opposite personal gravities, Sebastian and Julia are at best conflicted and at worst damned outright.
The director, Julian Jarrold, takes pains to uphold the miniseries’s tactile fascination with aristocratic wealth, a fetishistic intensity that Tom Wolfe mocked at the time as “plutography.” Arguably, the reliable Miramax and Merchant Ivory convention of presenting the trappings of the long-extinct world of British noblesse oblige as attractively as possible was inspired by the Granada Television “Brideshead.” It’s not surprising, then, that even trimmed to feature length, the new “Brideshead Revisited” exhibits that particular retro visual ardor in full flower. Music swells up on the soundtrack as the wide-screen frame fills with wall hangings, mirrors, and the Yorkshire sun setting over hedges that seem to stretch into the future.
To their credit, the filmmakers don’t shy away from the novel’s implication that Charles is in many ways a sort of human hand grenade that fate (or, per Waugh, grace) has rolled into a household full of blue bloods to hasten the job of self-destruction that they have already begun themselves. Like many of the themes and tropes common to Waugh’s novel and the Granada series, Charles’s culpability is in the new “Brideshead Revisited” somewhere; one just has to find it during those rare moments when the film isn’t busy making passionate love to the furniture.