Pass the Wine

Pass the Wine

Film Review of Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited

             Perhaps because my expectations had been brought so low by popular opinion, I was fully propped up and ready to loathe Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited. But for the first half hour, I almost liked it. Sumptuous and green, the Oxford and Brideshead of Charles and Sebastian’s summer lets the light hit them in such a way as to turn the stones magical and nearly transportal.* As Charles whips by his pompous cousin Jasper, he happily ignores his relation’s “wise” words and enjoys the company of Sebastian, who offers him a life of idyllic proportions. Little details were carefully included in the first scenes that as a reader of the original novel were deeply appreciated. The skull in Charles’s room at his father’s home sits in the window, a reminder of Charles’s attempts at being a thoughtful college boy. The immense size of Sebastian’s apology note to Charles serves to emphasize his childlikeness. Even Julia’s severe haircut comes straight from the pages, and the immense collection of wine and champagne that Sebastian and Charles happily guzzle fit quite contentedly in what I imagined.

            But there is a distinct moment when the director and screenwriters seem to have lost their grip on the story of Brideshead. When the collection of characters moves beyond Sebastian and Charles to adding the rest of the family, the story begins to lose its power. Don’t get me wrong. I think that in physical attributes the actors look very much how I imagined the characters. Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain captures the essence of elegance with her silvered curls and direct gaze. Bridey, I would still happily punch in the face. With Cordelia, however, I would like to unleash some holy vengeance upon whoever thought to destroy her character. In a story desperately in need of levity, someone saw fit to destroy perfectly good satire and dialogue. Cordelia may be a strange little creature, but there was no reason at all to make her a dislikeable, mousy presence. This trio piles out of their shiny car between the fountain and Brideshead, and something is immediately off because Sebastian very clearly expresses his dislike and discomfort. The audience is automatically set up to dislike them all, and they are given no opportunity to understand the other characters or care for them—an emotional connection burned.

            Now there is the matter of Julia. I didn’t mention this earlier because I was so enamored by the prettiness of the first half hour, but the screenwriters made what I considered at first a forgivable mistake. Then I realized an hour or so in that the mistake was about to push Evelyn Waugh’s carefully crafted love story into gushy territory. The novel is a flashback bookended delicately by the present day narrator Charles. The movie does commit to the flashback, but instead of going straight to the college days, it skips to the middle of the novel when Charles sees Julia again. Whatever, I thought, seeing Julia on the ship is not terribly inaccurate. But it took watching the movie in its entirety to see how that additional flashback is practically a red herring in terms of the original story. By showing Julia before Sebastian, I paid less attention to the relationship between Charles and Sebastian and was constantly trying to pick apart the moments between Charles and Julia. It was too easy to write off everything that happened between Charles and Sebastian as a phase. And it’s not like Charles’s and Julia’s relationship was exempt from distortion either. When I mentioned Hollywood's gushiness earlier, I wasn’t kidding. Some jerk actually gave Charles and Julia the oh-so-tearful conversation of, “But when we kissed—.” “Charles, please.” “Why? It was wonderful.” “I know….but I have no choice.” Seriously. The book's relationships were so much deeper than the movie could portray, and by cutting up Waugh’s dialogue for the sake of brevity and not clarity, the conversion of Charles’s can hardly be believable. He may dip his hands in the water, stare at the flame of the chapel candle, and barely smile, but it makes almost no sense without those Catholic conversations, struggles, and grace-filled love.

*I just made up this word. If there is any question as to what it means, please ask.