'OH MY D- D- DEAR!" Anthony Blanche, the camp aesthete in Evelyn Waugh's most delightfully barmy novel, might very well stutter. "It is one thing to make an appearance where you are not wanted; it is altogether another to turn up a full three months late. The shame!"
It is, indeed, a yawning 12 weeks since Julian Jarrold's largely useless adaptation of Brideshead Revisitedopened to critical raspberries in the UK. The delay only serves to highlight the egregious redundancy of the exercise.
Many of those poor reviews compared the smoky, superficially attractive film, directed by the man behind such underwhelming entertainments as Kinky Bootsand Becoming Jane, unfavourably with the durable 1981 television series.
As you will recall, that Granada production saw Jeremy Irons's Charles Ryder, a budding painter from upper middle-class stock, encountering a damaged Catholic aristocrat, Sebastian Flyte, amid the glutinous spires of Oxford. Over the years, Ryder becomes dangerously close to Sebastian's peculiar family while Flyte slips into fully fledged alcoholism. Cautious homoeroticism, crazily romanticised Catholicism and premiere league snobbery add guilty oddness to the story.
One can hear Mr Jarrold's head explode from here. Why mention the series? He and his collaborators have, they will claim, ignored the earlier adaptation and focused solely on the source material.
Well, if the film-makers didn't wish us to draw the comparison then they should, perhaps, have avoided using the same stately home as a stand-in for Brideshead, the Flyte's country pile. By returning to Castle Howard, Team Jarrold virtually demand that we contrast the two versions.
One is reminded that, in casting Irons and Anthony Andrews, both of whom were approaching 30, as Charles and Sebastian, the makers of the series risked ridicule. Those actors were, however, old enough to make substantial personalities of their characters.
In contrast, callow Matthew Goode (Charles) and raw Ben Whishaw (Sebastian) turn the friends into naughty, cheeky imps who deserve to have their bottoms spanked before being sent to bed with no plover's eggs. From the first seconds, when they ride their trikes onto the lawn and begin playing with their Action Men (not really), it's clear that it will be impossible to sympathise with either.
Emma Thompson does better as Sebastian's manipulative mother, but, by overdoing the brimstone, she diminishes the character's humanity.
Jarrold will point out that the TV series took an unprecedented 13 hours to adapt an only modestly sized book and that, running at about a fifth that length, his film is bound to trim certain situations and characters. Fair enough. What is, however, astonishing is that Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, the guilty screenwriters, have somehow found time to shoehorn in their own uniformly disastrous innovations. Julia, Sebastian's sister, now becomes intimate with Charles 10 years earlier than in the book, and a suggestion is planted that Ryder's motivating ambition is to get his hands on the deeds for Brideshead.
It all reeks of an attempt to (groan) make sense of the story for a modern audience. Instead, these modifications will, I suspect, lead viewers to regard Ryder as an irredeemable bastard. Then again, the audience will probably have drifted into a coma before they can ponder the characters' motivations.
"My dear. So t- t- tedious."
**
Directed by Julian Jarrold. Starring Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Hayley Atwell, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi 12A cert, gen release, 133 min
