Although it will doubtless find detractors among fans of
both Evelyn Waugh's novel and the 1981 PBS miniseries, Julian Jarrold's Brideshead
Revisited succeeds
handily on its own terms. It lacks the visual pyrotechnics of Joe Wright's Pride
& Prejudice,
but Jarrold's movie is otherwise a kindred spirit, stripped of voiceover and
other markers of literary bona fides. It's a movie of its own, not merely an
attempt to cram as much of its source as possible within the confines of a
theatrical feature.
Jarrold—who previously risked the wrath of the Jane
Austen faithful with Becoming Jane—joins screenwriters Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies in
departing radically from Waugh's plot, boiling the dramatis personae down to
three central characters: Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell), the eldest daughter of a
wealthy Catholic family; her brother Sebastian (Ben Whishaw), the family's
bibulous black sheep; and Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), a middle-class
Londoner who becomes entranced by the Flytes' wealth and sophistication after
he meets Sebastian at Oxford. After he gets his first glimpse of their immense
ancestral home, Brideshead, Charles is determined to find his way into the
Flytes' world and stay there as long as he can
But Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), Sebastian and Julia's
mother, wants nothing to do with Charles, less because of his untitled origins
than his avowed atheism. As far as she is concerned, her family is composed of
devout Catholics, even though her husband (Michael Gambon) lives in Venice with
his Italian mistress (Greta Scacchi), Sebastian is gay, and Julia is a
self-identified "half-heathen." Thompson might seem like a strange choice to
play the overpowering matriarch, but her performance is among the strongest of
her career. What usually comes off as vague self-amusement here seems like a
layer of righteous remove. Even when she's channeling the wrath of God, she
seems as if she isn't all there; she's already preparing for life in the next
world.
In Lady Marchmain's hands, Catholicism is a lethal weapon.
Her moralizing drives Sebastian to drink (and eventually to Morocco), and
poisons the long-simmering love between Julia and Charles. But the movie takes
the comforting power of faith as seriously as its power to destroy. It's rare
to find a work that explores issues of faith without veering into religious
fundamentalism or militant atheism, which is reason enough to revisit Brideshead
one more time.