Sunday, August 03, 2008
A+E, Movies, Reviews

This ‘Brideshead’ not worth a revisit

A shorttakes review of 'Brideshead Revisited'

Famous as an 11-hour 1981 miniseries, “Brideshead Revisited” gets a two-hour feature treatment. Things get lost in translation, but what sinks the movie are additions that weren’t in Evelyn Waugh’s book.

Matthew Goode plays Charles Ryder, a middle-class Brit who becomes infatuated first with aristocrat Sebastian Marchmain (Ben Whishaw) and then with his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). The new version pumps the situation into a would-be juicy triangle, forcing the gay and alcoholic Sebastian to pitch drunken, jealous fits. But these tweaks of the text don’t produce the soap-operatic juice you’d expect.

Director Julian Jarrold managed to score zero laughs in his drag-queen flick “Kinky Boots,” and here he seems unable to make his actors engage with each other. They seem muffled by the gorgeous costumes and stately homes surrounding them. Scenes that should be intense pass by limply. When the usually great Emma Thompson (as the monstrously pious Catholic matriarch, Lady Marchmain) has to telegraph her character’s illness by exiting a room and coughing, the movie teeters on Carol Burnett-style parody.

Whishaw and Atwell have both been memorable in other movies, but not here. And Goode is no Jeremy Irons. He’s got a plum voice and matinee-idol cheekbones, but there’s not a lot going on behind his eyes. Michael Gambon enlivens his few scenes as the reprobate Marchmain dad, but even he can’t singlehandedly bring to life this parade of wax figures. 2 STARS—Steve Murray