An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Nick Curtis's rating
Reader rating
"Sibling" rivalry: Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell fool around at the premiere of Brideshead Revisited, in which they play Sebastian and Julia Flyte
Atwell and Whishaw with Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder in the movie
Whishaw and Atwell look 'exquisite' in the film
After more than 60 years, Evelyn Waugh's much-loved novel has finally made it to the big screen.
Julian Jarrold's adaptation is as thoughtful and handsomely mounted a period piece as I've seen, loaded to the chimney pots with lovely frocks, vintage cars, and the best and most beautiful British actors around. A great escape from current woes, I suppose.
Of course it's more hurried than both the novel and the 1981 Granada TV adaptation in its exploration of troubled Catholicism, thwarted passions both gay and straight, and sheer bloody selfishness.
That's because it lasts two hours, not 11, and aims cinematically to distil the story.
But Jarrold's adaptation is also curiously unmoving. Once again, I wondered why a tale of faith and guilt, set among a snobbish and vanishing aristocratic elite in the Thirties, exerts such a hold on British minds.
To recap. Matthew Goode's Charles Ryder has no money and no family bar his sarcastic father but endless reserves of self-assurance.
At Oxford, Charles is drawn to rich, fey, elegantly wasted Sebastian Flyte. Then to Sebastian's magnificent family home, Brideshead.
Then to his interestingly bonkers and schismatic family - martyred Catholic Lady Marchmain back home, naughty Lord M with his mistress in Venice - and finally to Sebastian's foxy sister, Julia.
We can't blame him, really. Although Jarrold and writer Jeremy Brock concentrate on the final third of the book, Jarrold succinctly shows us Charles's world opening up, as grey London gives way to honey-coloured Oxford, then gleaming, white Brideshead and dazzling, ripple-dappled Venice.
Jess Hall's cinematography is sporadically stunning. The same goes for the cast.
Ben Whishaw's Sebastian is as thin and elegant and dangerously fragile as a glass shard.
The estranged Marchmains are played by Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon, who'd command anyone's attention on first meeting.
And Julia is played by Hayley Atwell, an erratically promising actress with a beguilingly minxy face and proper bombshell curves, which makes a nice change from the starved starlets we're used to.
Jarrold frames Atwell in doorways and mirrors, and with a knife-edged black bob, as if displaying a jewel.
She does look exquisite. So do Goode and Whishaw. So do the gleaming motor cars and the art deco dance interiors and Castle Howard, standing in - as it did in 1981 - for Brideshead.
But there's something missing. The religious message that Waugh claimed was central to the book is laid on here like cement between the human bricks.
And the characters, though lovely to look at and amusing to listen to, ultimately aren't that engaging.
Goode's uncanny stillness and self-possession make Charles something of a cipher. Whishaw is capable of great emotional depth but here plays overt and obvious as the script demands: the kiss Sebastian presses on Charles's lips drew a gasp from the woman beside me.
Atwell's Julia is fine when she's being capricious and enigmatic, but once she starts an affair with Charles - while both are married - she becomes a paranoid, god-bothering stereotype.
Everyone, towards the end, starts explaining things very clumsily.
Even the cameo-role honours are ultimately stolen from a lazy Gambon and a fiercely clenched Thompson by Patrick Malahide as Charles's eccentric father.
This is an elegant, intelligent transposition from page to cinema screen, but I can't help feeling that Waugh may be one of those authors better served by measured TV adaptations than by film.
Brideshead Revisited is on general release from Friday.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Morning:
13°c
