Always the Brideshead, Never Quite Right

There's at least one occasion on which Julian Jarrold's new film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel Brideshead Revisited could be indispensable. If you're assigned the novel for a class, don't want to actually read it, and need to develop a passing familiarity with its basic plot and thematic structures, look no further!

Otherwise, watching the film often feels frustrating, a bit like reading SparkNotes for fun—the essentials of a great book are there, yes, but we're losing out on the literary subtleties that made it a great book in the first place. (This is true especially of Waugh, whose bons mots are half of what cemented him in place as an English author worth reading.) Jarrold's Brideshead is compact, or at least relatively so—at 135 minutes, it's considerably shorter than the only other screen adaptation of the novel, an 11-hour miniseries that aired on PBS in 1982 and starred Sir Laurence Olivier and Jeremy Irons. Like the novel, the miniseries is generally agreed to be a masterpiece. The entire project, then, begs the question—why revisit Brideshead at all?

Thankfully, there are at least a few very good reasons. Like its literary wartime romance brethren (The English Patient, The End of the Affair, the more recent Atonement), the film is beautifully shot. It's almost a prerequisite of the genre: gorgeous cinematography is a filmmaker's way of apologizing to the bibliophile. There's no way to include Waugh's descriptions of the English countryside estate in which our protagonist, a young would-be painter and Oxford student named Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), finds himself—colorful, lingering, perfectly framed shots are the best way to approximate the experience on celluloid.

Charles begins spending time at Brideshead because of a friendship he's developed with fellow student Sebastian Flyte, an heir and a dandy played to perfection by Ben Whishaw. Sebastian is in love with Charles, who seems content to swim in the Flyte family's fountain and allow his relationship with Sebastian to remain ambiguous. Whishaw plays the part with a certain wide-eyed earnestness that brings to mind a British Andy Warhol—he bats his eyes in the same blank way, and you never quite know whether he's completely self-assured or completely self-conscious. He's a joy to watch, as is Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, the uber-religious mother of Sebastian and his sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell). What's so fascinating about Thompson's performance is that she portrays the fanaticism of Lady Marchmain as a fact, not an affectation—it's no less a part of her than the steel blue of her eyes.

A troubling aspect of Jarrold's Brideshead is that the whatever-it-is chemistry between Sebastian and Charles feels far more genuine than any romance between Charles and Julia, which is the focus of the latter half or so of the film. It's a shame, because both Goode and Atwell seem reluctant to break with the bounds of politesse and let a little passion slip out. The result is that when a title card comes up, alerting us that some years have passed, there's no natural inclination to know what's happened in the interim. “Oh, Charles and Julia have both married other people,” the audience yawns. “Well, all right.”

Temporally, the story of Brideshead is a sprawling one, which is why the miniseries was so well-regarded. It's a story that takes time to tell—time that Jarrold and company, unfortunately, just don't seem to have.