Novel Concept: Brideshead Revisited stars Ben Wishaw (left) and Matthew Goode in the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s book

Review

Brideshead Revisited

by Matt Prigge

Fans of Brideshead Revisited, both Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel and the seminal 11-hour BBC miniseries adaptation starring a young Jeremy Irons that first played in 1981, have already expressed their horror that a regular, ridiculously condensed theatrical movie was even attempted. But that’s only the beginning.

Said devotees’ jaws will start dropping relatively early on, namely with the first sufficient viewing of teddy bear-wielding aristocrat Sebastian Flyte (Perfume’s alien weirdo Ben Whishaw). In the novel and the miniseries, he’s young, dandyish upper-class privilege personified, and his relationship with our protagonist—upper-middle-class loner and fellow Oxfordite Charles Ryder (future Watchmen star Matthew Goode)—has been picked over and cherished for its wild-but-never- consummated homoeroticism.

But this is the 21st century, so Whishaw removes all doubt. His Sebastian is pure swish—a fey, mincing queen played with precisely zero restraint by the showboating thespian. You could hardly imagine a more uncomfortable-looking pair than over-the-top Whishaw and Goode, a stiff and stammering (and boring) tabula rasa, but there they are, perching close under a tree, skinny dipping in a fountain and even sharing an awkward kiss.

Alas, anyone peeved that the film’s complexity has been reduced for our times can relax—at least on this issue. Charles is still destined not for Sebastian but Sebastian’s fetching sister Julie (Hayley Atwell of Cassandra’s Dream), whom he meets when Sebastian drags him to his family’s stunning estate.

Once that doomed love affair has begun, it’s only a matter of time before Sebastian, along with any traces of bicuriosity, are unceremoniously booted from the movie altogether. What initially seems like a progressive misreading of the source backfires, treating Sebastian and Charles’ potential homosexuality like something to get over en route to a more “normal” relationship. So much for progress.

That leaves room for the film’s most brazen liberty with the book. With its Miramax logo at the beginning and the presence of a white-haired Emma Thompson as Sebastian and Julie’s quietly intimidating mother, Brideshead Revisited clearly intends to summon an era of Sundays spent with your grandma at the local art house, cozily imbibing other period pieces based on Jane Austen, Henry James and E.M. Forster.

But Waugh’s book is trickier. What makes it a tough adaptation, particularly for those without 11 hours to burn, is this: The classically doomed romance between Charles and Julie is really the pretext for an ulterior motive. Waugh, a Catholic convert, intended Brideshead to express his deep faith during a time of newly chic godlessness.

But he knew that there was no bigger turn-off for the secular than some earnest conversion story. So he set out to create an unsentimental, complex conversion story, with Charles as a well-meaning but self-involved atheist and the family of hardcore Roman Catholics who were positively riddled with flaws and sins but ultimately came off as morally superior.

This Brideshead Revisited doesn’t want to convert atheists into believers. Director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) and screenwriters Andrew Davies (the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice) and Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland) even end their film one step sooner than the novel, which has Charles climactically kneeling down in a chapel, fully flip-flopped.

Any adaptation ought to be its own thing, but the film’s hesitation to follow its source to the end produces a confused, schizophrenic work. Most of the film follows Charles, whose carefully considered opinion is that devout Catholicism, particularly as wielded by Thompson, has eroded this nutty family from within. But starting with one character’s deathbed conversion—a scene as campy as anything on the Trinity Broadcasting Network—the film suddenly respects their faith … but still won’t follow through on the finale.

As for making the gay subtext a more prominent theme, it’s a coy move, akin to trying to “fix” the novel but instead creating a whole other nest of problems. A movie extolling the virtues of unwavering faith might have been a bit creepy, but it would’ve been preferable to a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say.