Movies into Film.com
Brideshead Revisited
Directed by Julian Jarrold
Britain, 2008
With bubbly and a teddy: Ben Whishaw as Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited (Photo courtesy of Miramax)
I endured the new Brideshead
Revisited under barbaric conditions—in an un-air-conditioned screening
room that reeked of sulfur and cat piss. One stifling hour later, the
air-conditioning (a necessity for a July afternoon) finally kicked in; the
scent of sulfur never entirely subsided, which may explain why the rest of
press corps huddled in the back of the house. Not to be dissuaded from my
customary spot in the third or fourth row, I soldiered on.
Being taken with
the director Julian Jarrold’s previous film, the underrated Becoming Jane,
I’d looked forward to this. Becoming Jane, I thought, nicely
captured certain realities of English life (in the marital squabbles between
Julie Walters and James Cromwell, for one) and in the eternal struggle, or
tension, between those who have a creative impulse versus those who don’t, the
best and most emblematic example of this being the moment the young Jane Austen
turns her attention away from a wealthy suitor to scribble a few lines on a
scrap of paper. “What’s she doing?” bellowed an imperious matron, played by
Maggie Smith. “She’s writing,” offered the suitor. Smith: “Can anything be done
about it?”
No such humor
appears in Brideshead Revisited, a compendium of crass reductions
masquerading as an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel. The screenplay was begun
by Andrew Davies and finished—or rather, finished off—by Jeremy Brock, the
perpetrator of one of 2006’s very worst films, the abomination Driving
Lessons. Bizarre continuity problems—though they are the least of this
movie’s troubles—abound. For example, the friendship between Sebastian Flyte
(Ben Whishaw) and Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) begins when Sebastian upchucks
through the open window of Ryder’s Oxford flat. From the color of the sky
behind Sebastian, one surmises that the hour is still early evening; yet in a
matter of housekeeping even a college freshman would be hard put to explain,
the movie has Ryder toweling up the goop the next morning, apparently so
that he’ll have something to do when a messenger arrives bearing a scroll with
Sebastian’s apologies and invitation to lunch that day. Later, when Sebastian
takes Ryder to the family manse, Brideshead, for the first time, they steal
away, past all the fine sculptures and paintings, to visit an old lady in a
secluded room. As they part, the woman (a grandmother? a great-aunt?)
admonishes Ryder to take care of Sebastian, then is never seen or alluded to
again. The production notes identify her as a nanny, but even so, wouldn’t her
presence in the house be remarked upon by one of the family at some point?
More gratingly,
the screenwriters (to say nothing of the director) ultimately forget Sebastian,
too. During the long section near the end, when the alcoholic winds up in Marrakech
for an ongoing convalescence, the filmmakers scuttle not only his final days,
but his death as well. The moviemakers, though they want the homosexual
Sebastian to be more “out,” have idiotically emphasized Ryder’s love for his
friend’s sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) at the expense of Sebastian’s love for
Ryder. Indeed, there’s something faintly homophobic about the way Sebastian is
shucked off. First of all, there’s Whishaw’s dire misconception of the
role—overplaying him as a foppish, queenie stereotype: a flittering,
twittering, exaggerated camp dandy who oozes with self-conscious preciosity.
“It’s just heav’n with straw-burr-rys,” comes his solicitation to picnic in the
countryside. Unlike in the novel or the miniseries, this Sebastian gets to kiss
Ryder, a nice on-the-mouth smooch after a pleasant midday debauch with many an
empty wine bottle scattered about. The filmmakers put themselves in a bind with
the kiss: neither they nor the men can go any further without totally
re-writing Waugh or without ignoring that homosexuality was outlawed in England
at the time. And yet for Ryder to receive this kiss blankly staring off into
space, neither accepting nor rejecting, isn’t a plausible course. A sane
person, however inebriated, wouldn’t sit there blithely having no reaction at
all.
Let me quote
something from the Miramax press notes: “Charles’
friendship with Sebastian is not explicitly homosexual in the novel, though it
becomes clear by the end that Sebastian has found happiness in a homosexual
relationship, when he ends up living with Kurt, the German soldier he meets in
Morocco. The film makes Sebastian’s sexual attraction for Charles more
explicit, while maintaining some ambiguity as to how Charles deals with being
the object of such desire.”
Well,
no kidding about the ambiguity (although it’s actually the scenarists’
self-imposed dodge), but, more importantly, where’s Kurt? Absolutely nothing
“becomes clear” in the film re this development; Sebastian’s final scene, his
reunion with Ryder, is one of abject misery. (The moviemakers camouflage their
condescending view of Sebastian’s queer dilemma in all sorts of nifty ways: as
Ryder perches at the edge of a tub while Sebastian bathes, a jazz violin on a
wind-up Victrola in the next room scores their bitter pas de deux to a
jaunty blues tune, “What Wouldn’t I Do for That Man.”)
Happy family: Ben Whishaw, Michael Gambon, and Hayley Atwell in Brideshead Revisited (Photo courtesy of Miramax)
Miramax
also tells us this: “The difficult and passionate affair between Charles and
Julia only features in the second half of the book… The film has placed their
affair as part of its framing devices, thereby allowing the audience to see the
past through the prism of Charles’ love for Julia. By placing Julia in Venice
with Charles and Sebastian—a major change from the novel but one which was
approved by the Waugh estate—the filmmakers were able to bring her center-stage
in the film’s narrative, as well as to dramatize more powerfully and
economically the evolution of Charles [sic] affections from Sebastian to
Julia. The Waugh estate were [sic], in fact, happy to see this
relationship developed in the film.”
Were
they? Even leaving aside the issue of the youthful Waugh’s forsaking of
same-sex love affairs in favor of hetero married life as a conservative
Catholic (who was destined to feel gravely disappointed by the “liberal”
reforms of Vatican II), the decision to have Julia accompany the men to Venice
must rank as the movie’s most nonsensical move, because once the filmmakers get
her there, they trot out an ancient stock device—Sebastian, to his devastation,
spies Charles and Julia making out in a canal by moonlight—and on this cliché,
they pivot the remainder of Waugh’s motivations.
Long before this,
however, Brideshead Revisited, version .08, announces itself as
pure counterfeit. In an early scene between Ryder and his widowed father, a
disagreeable old crank played by Patrick Malahide, Malahide all too obviously
parrots John Gielgud’s vocal mannerisms. Listen to how Malahide snobbishly
thunders, “Most entertaining!” and you cannot help but hear Gielgud’s rhythm
and irony, but Malahide’s theft amounts to embarrassment, not homage.
The Oxford
sequences fare no better: the actors playing college students speak with
clipped diction well beyond the point of self-parody. And it’s dispiriting. The
ineptitude of this Brideshead Revisited shows us that not even
the British can make a British movie anymore. As Julia, Hayley Atwell, who made
a favorable impression in Woody Allen’s shockingly good Cassandra’s Dream, has been
given an unflattering variant on a pageboy hairdo, with severe straight bangs
beading her forehead and a rounded bob about her cheekbones. It’s a truly
hideous hairstyle, and in one scene, at her engagement party, done up in a
silver tiara and gauzy white gown embossed by sparkly Matisse-like cutout
figures on her bust, belly, and backside, she appears to be the Queen of the
Nile. None of Atwell’s Jazz Age faux-decadence convinces in the least.
Underscoring (and
upstaging) the phoniness of the other actors, there’s a late entrance by Emma
Thompson as a radiantly silver-maned Lady Marchmain. Thompson (no relation to
yours truly, at least none that I’m aware of) effortlessly demonstrates the
difference between acting and play-acting, a distinction lost on the younger
generation. As Sebastian and Julia’s deeply religious, emotionally distant
mother, Thompson doesn’t turn Lady Marchmain’s Catholic devotion into
caricature. In movies, it’s usually the Christian who is the single most
unbelievably written and acted character on screen (cf. Michelle Pfeiffer, Dangerous
Liaisons). Brideshead reverses this: it’s the atheist,
personified by Matthew Goode as Ryder, whom I couldn’t buy. Yet in a dinner
table meeting between Ryder and the family, with Lady Marchmain quizzing him
about his background, his beliefs, or the lack thereof (“An agnostic, surely?”)
Thompson energizes Goode. She holds him—and us—in her power, and the actor rises
to match her, a little. Thompson has only a small role; this is, nonetheless,
her most exacting and exciting work in longer than I can remember. After
flubbing around in such inanities as Angels in America or
throwing pies on the David Letterman show, she can still be great. When Sebastian
drunkenly humiliates his mother and sister in front of the guests at Julia’s
party, Thompson’s Lady Marchmain silently commands the orchestra to resume
playing—a deft combination of power and defeat in the same gesture.
The rest of the
time, Jarrold’s camera fetishizes Goode: the nape of his neck, the expanse of
his bare chest once Ryder and Julia consummate—his bland, oily handsomeness
becomes an object—a man who’s all eyelids, suntan, cigarettes, and unbuttoned
collars.
Cinematographer Jess Hall lovingly photographs—to
better effect—the grounds at Castle Howard. Hall achieves a number of stunning
shots involving the sculptures on the yard, including the spectacular Atlas
fountain in front of the family manse. In a truly arresting composition, a strongman
cradles an enfant, lifting the newborn up into the air, on the far right edge
of the frame, a vast blue sky dominating the physical space left and center. If
only the entire film had been at that level of invention. When a statue has
more to say to us than the leads, the filmmaking, if you’ll forgive a
redundancy, has gone terribly wrong. – NPT
July 14, 2008
Movies into Film
©2008, N.P. Thompson
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com