Brideshead Revisited (2008) Movie Review & Film summary, Cast

A dreary affair. I was pulling for it to work on its own terms. The Granada mini-series is one of the great works of television, flat out, but it’s also not sacrosanct: Clive James and other critics attacked it with some accuracy for being drawn-out and literal where Waugh is concise and witty. Hence my feeling there was room for a film version. Just not this film. Though it’s only two hours where the series is thirteen, it feels longer. The tale is all about nuance, and it’s the nuance that’s entirely been cut away. Where a kind of daydreaming impressionism might have captured the flavour required, director Julian Jarrold’s work reveals entirely how he’s inherited the mantle of the likes of Jack Clayton, Nicholas Hytner, and Richard Eyre, as the earnest, clodhopping Middlebrow English Non-Auteur of the moment. Despite the publicised efforts to explicate the gay themes and central menage-a-trois, it renders the romances far more limp, and infinitely less sexy, before building to a synopsised edition of Waugh’s Catholic triumphalism. Not helping is the cast, entirely inferior to that in the mini-series: Hayley Atwell’s laughable, sub-drama school rendition of Julia’s fountain-side monologue, delivered with the force of true religiose tragedy by the great Diana Quick back when, is the worst, but not only, example. Ben Whishaw’s Sebastian is a spindly, spineless twerp totally lacking charisma, and Matthew Goode’s Charles is passive and dour to the point of becoming soporific. Worse yet, almost everything that’s really interesting is surgically removed: the satire and dry humor are gone, replaced by a leaden blandness; Anthony Blanche shrunken to a cameo; ditto Cordelia; and Rex Mottram reduced to a snaky villain. Emma Thompson delivers a surprisingly good Lady Marchmain, and Jarrold does manage to visually, and not merely verbally, communicate the oppressiveness of her regime. But otherwise the filmmaking is cliched and shapeless – cavorting in the surf to communicate innocent abandon and dashing through Venetian shadows in a puerile scene of romantic disillusion. Avoid.