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Brideshead Revisited

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Stop bashing Brideshead

 

Tragic love story: Charles (Matthew Goode), Julia (Hayley Atwell) and Sebastian (Ben Wishaw)

Professional: Emma Thompson stars in the new production

Other reviews

• Brideshead is hurriedly revisited
• Revisited Brideshead is no match for TV ancestor

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I don’t think Evelyn Waugh would spin in his grave if heaven showed him Julian Jarrold’s version of his best known novel. But it wouldn’t surprise me if a little smoke was seen issuing from it.

However, I would reprimand those — and there will be a fair number — who compare it to the 1981 television version. That was more than 600 minutes long, in 11 episodes, and could linger over Waugh’s words and themes in a way a film cannot. This adaptation, written by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock and decked out with an able cast and production values no one could decry, is a different entity. If you haven’t read the book or seen the TV series, you’ll probably enjoy the film most.

In his book, Waugh, a conservative Catholic with one or two unlikely radical inclinations, told us how he regretted the smashing, largely by the war, of the care-free days of the middle class in the Thirties and also of the importance of a certain kind of Catholicism which was not so much a matter of faith as a way towards Godliness that cannot be shirked.

He said a lot of other things as well. But this film boils it all down into a tragic love story where, towards the end, religion figures more than worldly affection. Ultimately, Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell) refuses to marry Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) not because it would be betraying her class but because she has just seen Michael Gambon’s old rebel Lord Marchmain come back from Venice to die and make peace with his maker in his last moments. This is her life, and no one and nothing can tear her away from it.

While Waugh clearly approves of her sacrifice, Jarrold’s film, which looks at the tragedy with 21st-century eyes, seems to be asking us to disapprove. Which, of course, is easy to do. Even so, whichever way you judge it from the moral point of view, the death and its direct aftermath is among the finest sequences in the film.

The other distraction on screen is the stolidity of Goode’s performance. His is not a bad portrait and he sustains it well enough. But either because of the writing or, more probably, the casting, there’s a lack of real emotion that deprives this handsome production of one of its main struts. You understand what’s happened to him but you don’t feel it enough.

That is not true of Ben Wishaw’s charming but hopelessly unsettled Sebastian Flyte — very different from Anthony Andrews’s upper-class toff on television. Wishaw’s Flyte is a young man tortured by his inability to knuckle under his mother’s all-embracing faith and is as desperate to get away from the ancestral pile as Charles, whom he loves, is enamoured of it.

Mother is played by Emma Thompson, whom some might say was imperfectly cast but whose performance is riveting. She has the capacity to underline both the horror and the justice of her spiritual position even when Ryder, the avowed atheist, tells her she has wrecked the happiness of both her daughter and son in this world even if it has prevented damnation in the next.

Class, of course, comes into the proceedings a lot, though it is now difficult for us to see much difference between Ryder’s middle-class manners and those of the aristocratic Flyte and Marchmain brood. However, there is a good moment when, sitting down to dinner at Brideshead in a flannel suit and apologising for being wrongly dressed, Charles is told by Lady M not that it’s all right but that she is sure Sebastian can lend him something in the future.

All the other performances are more than adequate, laid out before us in a film that pleases the eye like so many British period pieces that take more care with the visuals than with the heart and soul of their stories. Castle Howard again stands in for Brideshead and Jess Hall’s cinematography and a bevy of art directors and designers give the production considerable class.

In the end, however, this is a film which though less ambitious than Atonement is very much the equal of The Duchess. Its weakness is the same as that of the latter: it has no guiding hand prepared to take risks and make it distinctive. It is so competent and professional that Waugh’s essential flair disappears within its magnificent visuals.

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