Brideshead Revisited
(Julian Jarrold)
Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Hayley Atwell, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon.
Running time: 134 minutes. (12A)
“The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it.” So wrote Evelyn Waugh about the impending disaster felt by Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. Imagine the novel as a china shop on that same hillside and Julian Jarrold’s adaptation as the impending avalanche.
Waugh’s great novel is not so much revisited as reconstituted. It’s a chicken burger movie. Screenwriters Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies take it upon themselves to chop it up and add some new filling. It’s now pat, blunt and over-salted. You can’t fault the performances: Ben Whishaw’s Sebastian is a fey flower, while Emma Thompson turns Lady Marchmain into a patrician Windsor. But the movie is a lumbering trudge. It leaves you yearning for Waugh’s ineffable nostalgia.
Perhaps only one director could have nailed it. Sadly Luchino Visconti died 32 years ago. In The Leopard and Death in Venice, he took two great novels about time and decay, honoured them, and produced two masterpieces in the process. Oh well.
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