Rebel And Sebastian | Ben Whishaw and Matthew Goode display excellent manors in Brideshead Revisited
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
Directed by Julian Jarrold. Starring Matthew Goode, Hayley Atwell, Ben Whishaw. Now playing.
***
You have to give director Julian Jarrold props for even trying.
Attempting to compress Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s scathing treatise on sex, religion, and the British class system—also filmed in 1981 as an 11-hour BBC miniseries still revered by Anglophile film lovers—into a just-under-two-hour movie... well, that takes some cojones.
Not that Jarrold’s glossy take on Waugh’s novel won’t be seen as sacrilege to purists—with the assistance of scriptwriter Jeremy Brock, Jarrold throws out a great deal of Waugh’s subtext, paring the story down to a tragic love triangle that, by necessity, tramples over much of what made the miniseries both lovingly detailed and somewhat tedious.
Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) is a social-climbing son of a tradesman harbouring love affairs with two members of the wealthy and aristocratic Flyte family: Julia Mottram (Hayley Atwell) and brother Sebastian (Ben Whishaw), a former classmate at Oxford. Now posted at the family’s grand ancestral mansion of Brideshead, a military headquarters during the war, Charles can reminisce about his consecutive crushes while wallowing in his unconscious desire to throw off the shackles of his middle-class background and sneak in among the titled elite.
There remains a very significant hurdle in Charles’ way, however: matriarch Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), who quite correctly sees Charles as a class-jumping interloper. And worse: he’s a professed atheist, and the Marchmains have always been Roman Catholic. The early platonic friendship between Charles and the very gay Sebastian, who takes the younger boy under his wing, results in a summer holiday at the estate, where the two share a passionate kiss.
But it all goes to hell when the married Lady Julia appears, and eventually both she and Charles fall in love, much to the chagrin of Sebastian, who reacts in the way all excellently doomed mid-century English lovers with fine features, great hair, and exquisite wit do—by throwing himself into drugged excess in another country.
Waugh was a famous Catholic convert among a group of other like-minded English novelists that included G.K. Chesterton and Graham Greene—and as such he both wrestled with and firmly clung to orthodoxy. His beliefs (and his struggle with dogma) are splashed all over the novel. He’s merciless, for instance, in his depiction of the way in which rigid Lady Marchmain destroys her own family. But just as Waugh’s rapier pen never so viciously (and unsubtly) skewered his faith as much as the filmmakers do, time constraints dictate that the sexual tension between Charles and Sebastian be made explicit in a way that Waugh—who, it’s been suggested, had a few issues along those lines himself—would have been horrified by.
Brideshead Revisited looks great—it functions almost as much as a Beautiful Homes of England travelogue as a love story—but shorn of much of Waugh’s subtext, it comes across as Merchant Ivory Lite. It’s Whishaw who carries the film (if a little extravagantly) as the doomed Sebastian, practically flouncing through some scenes, stealing the camera’s gaze from his co-stars. Only Thompson can stand toe-to-toe with him as the icy matriarch caught up in tradition and family honour. But these two fine performances simply aren’t enough to lift the film above any number of other second-rate costume drama soaps.
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