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Any Brideshead fans out there?
The Granada TV series came out just as I was coming out, so it will always have a special place in my heart.
I've been a little worried about the new film. The trailer looks awful , as if it turns the complex novel into a love triangle.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/67/Brideshead_revisited.jpg)
(http://www.maggiescentres.org/maggies/maggiescentres/home/eventsfundraising/events/socialevents/imageParagraphs/0/image/BHR1_1.jpg)
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiiX9CAuMF4[/youtube]
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Here's a favorable review from Newsweek:
You Can Go Home Again
'Brideshead Revisited' was once a classic 11-part miniseries. A new film tells the tale in two hours.
By David Ansen | NEWSWEEK
Published Jul 18, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Jul 28, 2008
Anyone who fell in love with the landmark 11-part British TV series of "Brideshead Revisited" 26 years ago is likely to approach the movie version debuting next week with extreme trepidation. Not to mention all those who have fallen under the spell of Evelyn Waugh's opulent, elegiac 1945 novel. How could this rich work possibly be condensed into a film running a bit over two hours?
Director Julian Jarrold ("Becoming Jane") and screenwriters Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock clearly knew they'd be facing comparisons—Jarrold, not wanting to be influenced by the Granada TV series, claims not to have seen the original. They argue that this literary classic, like a Shakespeare play, needs to be reinterpreted for a new generation, re-evaluated with contemporary eyes.
In fact, more than any Waugh novel, "Brideshead" lends itself to different readings: what you take away from it says as much about your own obsessions and world view as it does about Waugh's intentions. Written during the privations of World War II, the book looks back to the '20s and '30s, memorializing the last gasp of the dying aristocratic order. Waugh's stand-in is the covetous, wide-eyed, middle-class painter Charles Ryder, who falls in love with the children of the Marchmain family, Roman Catholic aristocrats who invite him into their imposing ancestral home, Brideshead Castle.
According to Waugh, who converted to Catholicism in 1930, his theme was "the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters." Yet the primal "Brideshead" image to me is the one that adorned the paperback I read in college: the charming, decadent Sebastian Flyte carrying a teddy bear. For some it may be the grand estate itself and its real-life stand-in: Castle Howard, a setting so iconic in the series that the filmmakers used it again. For many who worshiped weekly at the "Brideshead" altar in 1982, the series was the apotheosis of a certain mandarin gay sensibility, even though the homosexual motifs were always unstated, and the nature of Charles's infatuation with Sebastian left ambiguous. I'd bet that many barely remember the issues of sin and sacrifice and Catholic guilt that lurk in the mystical depths of "Brideshead's" last act. For the non-Catholic reader, and for contemporary viewers, Waugh's spiritual themes don't quite take hold; it's as if he created characters too strong to fit the mold of their author's intentions. His artistry outshone his ideology.
The remarkable thing about Jarrold's movie is how much of the book it manages to capture. The focus has shifted: it's structured as a love triangle. Ryder (Matthew Goode, in the role that made Jeremy Irons a star) falls first for the dandy Sebastian (Ben Whishaw), who widens his worldly horizons, and then for his sophisticated, spiritually conflicted sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). Sebastian's sexual attraction to Charles has been made more explicit; his jealousy when he discovers (in a scene that's not in the novel) that Ryder and Julia are in love is the trauma that sends him spiraling into his alcoholic decline.
As Sebastian, the thin, dark-haired Whishaw is both the most riveting thing about the movie and the most problematic, for he has radically reinvented the character. Febrile, tightly wound and more overtly gay than the blond, debonair Anthony Andrews, Whishaw's vulnerable Sebastian seems doomed from the get-go. Jarrold's movie, rushing too fast through the halcyon days at Oxford, short-shrifts Sebastian's legendary charm.
Other omissions are painful but understandable: the extravagant, stuttering queen Anthony Blanche has been reduced to a cameo; young Cordelia barely registers; Ryder's father, played by John Gielgud on TV, has lost his best scenes. What remains, however, is formidable. Emma Thompson makes the iron-willed Lady Marchmain a figure both terrifying and sympathetic; Michael Gambon's lusty Lord Marchmain, who's abandoned his family for life in Venice with his mistress (Greta Scacchi), gets the most out of his brief appearances, and Atwell is a wonderfully sensual and sharp-edged Julia, torn between her love for Charles and her religious beliefs.
The toughest role, because it's so reactive, is Ryder himself. Because the film doesn't rely as heavily on voice-over to convey his inner thoughts, Goode faces a challenge illuminating the soul of this diffident, divided, ambitious man, whose own social and sexual aspirations even he doesn't fully understand. It's a solid, sensitive performance. He sounds remarkably like Irons, but he doesn't have Irons's quicksilver transparency, that ability to let us see the roiling feelings under Charles's formal English reserve.
Think of Jarrold's briskly paced, stylish abridgment as a fine introduction to Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy. It brings these unforgettable characters to life again, and if it sends people back to the novel, and back to Charles Sturridge's classic TV series, all the better. There's room for more than one "Brideshead" in this far less glamorous day and age.
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From the Telegraph. More ambiguity!
***
Brideshead Revisited 'will upset purists' with gay kiss
By Chris Hastings and Stephanie Plentl
Last Updated: 4:01pm BST 19/07/2008
The relationship between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder has been the subject of intense speculation ever since the fateful day they met at Oxford University.
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/graphics/2008/07/19/bride404.jpg)
(Ben Whishaw as Sebastian Flyte, left, and Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder
Nicola Dove/Courtesy of Miramax Films)
But now a new film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited will out Sebastian Flyte as a homosexual and even feature a gay kiss between him and Charles.
In one controversial scene in the new £10 million film, which has its world premiere in New York on Tuesday, a love struck Sebastian attempts to kiss Charles on the mouth before his amorous advances are resisted.
The scene has been welcomed by some gay rights campaigners who have already dubbed the film “the most overtly” gay Brideshead ever.
But it is set to infuriate purists who insist that the relationship between the two friends has been distorted.
Brideshead Revisited tells the story of Charles Ryder and his infatuation with Lord Sebastian Flyte, his aristocratic family and their ancestral home, Brideshead.
The two men meet while students at Oxford and Ryder finds Flyte’s decadence and loucheness irresistible.
Although fans of the novel and the 1981 Granada television adaptation which starred Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews have debated the nature of the relationship between the two friends neither the book, which appeared in 1945, or the TV adaptation carry any overt references to homosexual feelings.
Andrew Davies, the Bafta winning dramatist who co-wrote the film’s script said: “I think it will probably upset the purists.
“But one thing we wanted to make clear was that Sebastian was gay and that Charles although terribly fond of him is heading in another direction sexually.
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“Waugh had a very skilful way of skating over the sordid details so we can imagine what we like about them.
“This ambivalence was probably the result of his own sexual ambivalence."
Kevin Loader, the film’s producer insisted that the tone of the new film is closer to the actual spirit of the novel than the 1981 television version which also starred Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom and John Gielgud.
Kevin Loader, the film’s producer said: “There is a lot less lounging around in punts in our version. I think people who have only seen the television adaptation are surprised when they get around to reading the book. I think there is no doubt that Sebastian is homosexual and there is a kiss in our version.
“The producers of the television version probably wanted to include such a scene back then. But that sort of thing was a lot more controversial in 1981 than it is today.”
The film’s director, Julian Jarrold however admitted that things weren’t so clear cut in the book.
“There is a level of ambiguity in the relationship between Charles and Sebastian in the book. Sebastian needs and wants Charles but it is veiled. It isn’t an explicit gay love story and I didn’t want to make it that."
But Frederic Raphael, the Oscar winning dramatist who wrote the films Darling, Far From The Madding Crowd and Eyes Wide Shut said: “It is not a terrible scandal of course but it is odd to embellish the novel because the eroticising is implausible. But in films nowadays big things have to happen immediately or else the audience gets bored.”
The new film concentrates on the triangle of Julia, Charles and Sebastian who are played by Hayley Atwell, Ben Whishaw and Matthew Goode.
It co-stars double Oscar winner Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, Michael Gambon as Lord Marchmain and Greta Scacchi as his mistress.
In a further departure from the book, the character of Julia joins Charles and Sebastian on a trip to Venice. Castle Howard, who famously played Brideshead in the TV adaptation, again stars in the film.
The idea of a movie was first mooted in 2002 with a screenplay by Davies and a cast that included Jude Law, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly. But that proposal never materialised.
Davies’s script was then rewritten by Jeremy Brock for the now completed film. Both men share a writing credit.
The film is released in the United States next week and in Britain in September.
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Here's a nice picture:
(http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h243/lnicoll/Maine/brideshead-revised.jpg)
Accompanying article can be found here:
http://www.dandyism.net/?p=978
L
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Any Brideshead fans out there?
The Granada TV series came out just as I was coming out, so it will always have a special place in my heart.
I've been a little worried about the new film. The trailer looks awful , as if it turns the complex novel into a love triangle.
Me! Me!
I loved, loved the tv series. I really awoke the anglofile in me. I'll definitely watch the movie too. I didn't even know a movie was in the works.
Another book I need to reread!
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The new film? Wrongheaded and stupid; I have so much to say I'd better say nothing before I sputter and fume.
Nice touch, with the apple (see photo immediately following)--very subtle, no??
Gah!
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/20/arts/20llyal.xlarge1.jpg)
There's a pre-review of a review in the New York Times called Revisiting ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ which is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/movies/20lyal.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/movies/20lyal.html)
Here are the accompanying 'band-box' photos with The NYTimes captions:
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/18/arts/00434_05259.jpg)
With the film version of "Brideshead Revisited," costuming is central to the narrative. In a phone interview, Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh, the film's costume designer, spoke about some of her designs.
From left, Ben Wishaw as Sebastian Flyte, Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder and Hayley Atwell as Julia Flyte.
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/18/arts/00671_08556.jpg)
"The period of dress here is a classic English look," said Ms. Mhaoldomhnaigh. "The tailoring of the men's suits are quite relevant to today. For a contemporary American audience, it's very similar to Ralph Lauren, who, I'm sure, has taken a lot of influence from English tailoring. " (Hah!--The cynical JG)
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/18/arts/00655_08185.jpg)
"This scene is at Oxford. And it's one of the first times that Charles sees Sebastian (seated). So I wanted to portray a contrast to Charles's dark and dreary life at home with a complete release for him to do whatever he likes. Sebastian represents that freedom for him."
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/18/arts/00673_08581crp.jpg)
"Charles and Sebastian become friends and Sebastian has this beautiful sense of style. Here, you can see already that Charles is looking at Sebastian and, in a quite crude way, trying to copy what he's wearing. It doesn't look nearly as flamboyant or bohemian as Sebastian, but still, it's his attempt to become part of that whole set."
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/18/arts/00500_06397.jpg)
"I think that with Lady Marchmain, Emma Thompson's character, her religion was really important. But also, she was very fashionable. At that time, a lot of women went to Paris twice a year to pick out their wardrobe. So I wanted her clothes to be influenced by French fashions of the time."
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/18/arts/00663_08342.jpg)
"I wanted to use certain colors with her. Of course, not primary colors, but teal blues and purples. I felt like she could never look disheveled. She always had to look like 10 maids had dressed her in the morning."
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/18/arts/00821_10549.jpg)
"I just love this dress. And it was kind of a Eureka moment. Julia's costumes were made in Paris because her clothing also was influenced by French fashion. So I went to Paris to meet with the people were going to make the costumes. And I went to a flea market, where I found the Japanese embroidery that we put on this dress."
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Evelyn Waugh (who has been spinning in his grave since the first shovel of dirt hit the coffin in 1966) has burrowed through the center of the Earth, came out in Papua New Guinea, and launched himself into outer space.
http://
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/movies/20lyal.html
From The New York Times
Film
Revisiting ‘Brideshead Revisited’
By SARAH LYALL
Published: July 20, 2008 LONDON
THE images from the 11-episode mini-series are still vivid, 27 years later. Louche young Oxford students in crisp linen suits (and one teddy bear) drinking endless cocktails. A spectacular country estate, dripping with treasures and crackling with religious, sexual and dynastic tensions. A delicately beautiful Jeremy Irons.
It is those lingering memories, even more than Evelyn Waugh’s novel, that anyone attempting to turn “Brideshead Revisited” into a feature film for the first time naturally has to contend with. And so as not to contaminate his approach Julian Jarrold, the director, studiously avoided the mini-series — all that elegiac emotion, spread out over 659 languorous minutes — and returned to the book.
“It exposed some of the myths I’d had about ‘Brideshead,’ ” Mr. Jarrold said of his rereading. “I’d had the memory of it being a nostalgia trip about the passing of English life and a bygone era, a glorification of aristocracy — about people wearing odd clothes and poncing around Oxford.” That was part of it, he said. But there was also a bite and a sharpness that are as relevant now as they were in 1945, when the novel was published.
“One of the reasons for the book’s popularity is, it is an archetypal type of story of this young individual from a poorer, less interesting background who is welcomed into this beautiful, magical, alluring kingdom with wonderful, magical people,” Mr. Jarrold said. “And then he begins to realize that everything is not what it seems.”
The film, which is to be released on Friday, is set in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s and stars Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder, the unworldly student whose friendship with the aristocratic Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) introduces him to a whole new world of money, class privilege, deep happiness and deep despair. Castle Howard, an estate in Yorkshire, stands in for Brideshead, home to Sebastian and his family, a symbol of a dying way of life and a character in itself.
The mini-series was written by John Mortimer and stars Anthony Andrews as the teddy-bear-carrying Sebastian. It opens and ends with Charles (Mr. Irons), now a British Army officer, unexpectedly encamped at Brideshead during World War II. He begins to replay in his mind the role Brideshead, with its dark sorrows and bewitching delights, played in his life some 20 years earlier.
In this new version the filmmakers have, of necessity, pared down the story. World War II comes up only at the end. There is less time to dwell on the seemingly endless summer when Charles and Sebastian meet and their lives gradually become entwined. Some supporting characters given prominence in the mini-series — Sebastian’s younger sister, Cordelia, played in the original by Phoebe Nicholls, for example, or his waspish friend Anthony Blanche (Nickolas Grace in the series)— appear only glancingly in the film.
“It was a terrible struggle, and we worked for many, many hours on the screenplay in order to make the right choices,” said Jeremy Brock, who wrote it with Andrew Davies. “But bluntly, you have a 330-page novel and a two-hour film, and you don’t have the luxury of being able to include everybody.” (So why do it at all, you idiot--JG. Sorry.)
The filmmakers also have played up the love triangle of Charles, Sebastian and Sebastian’s bewitching sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell). An extended scene during a night of erotic possibility in Venice serves to advance Charles’s romance with Julia. (All the changes — including placing Julia in Venice — were approved by the Waugh estate, the filmmakers said.) (Ugh!!--JG)
“This puts Julia center stage,” Mr. Brock said of the Venice scenes. “When you read the novel, there is a sense that she is slightly the one who comes after Sebastian, that she is No. 2, and I think it’s not quite fair. The true love story for Charles is the one with Julia.”
And while the homoerotic longings between Charles and Sebastian are more implied than explicit in the earlier incarnations, in the film they share a quick kiss. Instantly their easy camaraderie is polluted by a new awkwardness and inhibition.
“There’s a sense that maybe they’ve crossed a line that one of them isn’t ready to cross,” Mr. Brock said of the kiss.
In a surprising casting move Lady Marchmain, the matriarch whose deep religious faith reverberates so tragically through the lives of her children, is played by Emma Thompson, made up toward the end of the film to look much older.
“I always associate Emma Thompson with being youthful and contemporary and playing decent, sensitive characters, whereas obviously this is the complete opposite,” Mr. Jarrold said. But Ms. Thompson can play old as well as young, lacing her character’s prodigious charm with a chilly savagery.
As much as it is a story about a lost period of English history — a final shining moment before everything changed forever — “Brideshead” is a novel about the inexorable pull of Catholicism. The issues it raises are particularly relevant now, Mr. Brock said, though viewers may interpret what they see differently depending on the role of faith in their own lives.
A scene toward the end, when the Marchmain family tussles over the soul of Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) as he lies on his deathbed, is wrenching and even shocking. After abandoning his wife and her self-sacrificing piety for a life of sensuality and ease in Italy, Marchmain has returned home to die. But what sort of role should Catholicism play, with its ability to pull in lapsed members with a “twitch upon the thread,” as Waugh put it, citing G. K. Chesterton, at the end of Marchmain’s life? To Charles’s fascinated horror, the question is of central importance to the family, and there is only one possible answer.
“In that tug between individual freedom and fundamentalist religion, there’s a story that’s apposite for our time,” Mr. Brock said. “In the modern age that’s something we’re all dealing with.”
An important divergence in tone from Waugh’s novel, Mr. Jarrold said, comes in the closing scene, when Charles — now back at Brideshead during World War II — talks to Lieutenant Hooper, a fellow soldier who has a rough accent and the forthright views of a modern man unimpressed by the aristocracy. How to portray him led to long discussions about the way that Waugh “is sometimes profoundly undemocratic” and disdainful of Hooper and what he represents, Mr. Jerrold said.
In the book Hooper is “described as a traveling salesman with a wet handshake,” he said. “But he’s the future of England, and the hope of the 1945 generation, and we’ve put a positive spin on him.” (Of course they did--they ARE Hooper!--JG)
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Oh, dear me! :-\
Have they really made such a mess of it?
Maybe I should just order the tv series on dvd instead. :)
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"This puts Julia center stage,” Mr. Brock said of the Venice scenes. “When you read the novel, there is a sense that she is slightly the one who comes after Sebastian, that she is No. 2, and I think it’s not quite fair. The true love story for Charles is the one with Julia.”
True? According to whom? I have to dig out my copy of the novel. I seem to recall more of a sense of ambiguity. There's even a line, something like, was Julia a stand-in for Sebastian, or, was Sebastian a precursor to Julia?
Just who is the Waugh estate, anyway?
Meanwhile, I'll have another plover's egg...care for one, John?
(I have a feeling this film is going to lay an egg...)
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Meanwhile, I'll have another plover's egg...care for one, John?
I'd love one! And now, thanks to aphasia, I stutter like Anthony Blanche, I should learn how to be wicked and depraved like Anthony! ::)
I saw the trailer, by the way--hilarious where not angry making. I feel for the actors, decent types, who must take the paycheck and gag behind the hand.
At one point, Emma Thompson has to say "Mr Ryder, I hope you are enjoying your vacation," rather then saying 'holiday.'
I mean as if!!!
Please--
Lady Marchmain using the word 'vacation'??
Ugh!!
Wikipedia: vacation
Vacation is a term used in English-speaking North America to describe a lengthy time away from work or school, a trip abroad, or simply a pleasure trip away from home, such as a trip to the beach that lasts several days or longer. In the rest of the English-speaking world the word holiday is used, whereas in North America, "holiday" normally applies to a specific national holiday or long weekend related to such a day. In some cases "vacation holiday" is used in North America, which signifies that a vacation trip is taken during a traditional national holiday period, extended on either end of the period by taking additional time off from work—creating a longer time unencumbered by work, an extended "long weekend", as it were. This practice is common in the United States where employers give far fewer annual vacation days (see below) than European employers—so stretching the related national holidays tends to conserve one's accumulated total of eligible days available for longer quality vacation excursions.
In England the word "vacation" referred specifically to the long summer break taken by the law courts (and later universities)—a custom introduced by William the Conqueror from Normandy where it was intended to facilitate the grape harvest. The French term is similar to the American English: "Les Vacances." The term derives from the fact that, in the past, upper-class families would literally move to a summer home for part of the year, leaving their usual family home vacant. Most countries around the world have labor laws mandating a certain number of days of time off per year to be given to a worker. In Canada the legal minimum is two weeks, while in most of Europe the limit is significantly higher. Neither the U.S. nor China requires that employees receive any vacation time at all. There are movements fighting for laws requiring more vacation time for American workers such as timeday.org.
In modern employment practice, vacation days are often coupled with Sick leave, official holidays, and sometimes personal days.
Americans and Canadians, especially those of recent British or European descent, may also use the word "holiday." "Annual Leave" is another expression used in Commonwealth countries. Many Canadians use both "holiday" and "vacation"; "...I'm taking holidays..." is a common expression, something not often heard in the United States.
(Ok, I know I'm a pill, but--still!)
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I'd love one! And now, thanks to aphasia, I stutter like Anthony Blanche, I should learn how to be wicked and depraved like Anthony! ::)
I expanded my vocabulary by listening to Anthony Blanche utter such words as "macabre" and "lugubrious". "She's a bloodsucker, I tell you, a bloodsucker."
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I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable
for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by
reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of
behaviour which seemed to know no bounds. My first sight of him was as we
passed in the door of Germer's, and, on that occasion, I was struck less by
his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large Teddy-bear.
"That," said the barber, as I took his chair, "was Lord Sebastian
Flyte. A most amusing young gentleman."
"Apparently," I said coldly.
"The Marquis of Marchmain's second boy. His brother, the Earl of
Brideshead, went down last term. Now he was very different, a very quiet
gentleman, quite like an old man. What do you suppose Lord Sebastian wanted?
A hair brush for his Teddy-bear; it had to have very stiff bristles, not,
Lord Sebastian said, to brush him with, but to threaten him with a spanking
when he was sulky. He bought a very nice one with an ivory back and he's
having 'Aloysius' engraved on it -- that's the bear's name." The man, who,
in his time, had had ample chance to tire of undergraduate fantasy, was
plainly captivated by him. I, however, remained censorious and subsequent
glimpses of Sebastian, driving in a hansom cab and dining at the George in
false whiskers, did not soften me, although Collins, who was reading Freud,
had a number of technical terms to cover everything.
Nor, when at last we met, were the circumstances propitious. It was
shortly before midnight in early March; I had been entertaining the college
intellectuals to mulled claret; the fire was roaring, the air of my room
heavy with smoke and spice, and my mind weary with metaphysics. I threw open
my windows and from the quad outside came the not uncommon sounds of
bibulous laughter and unsteady steps. A voice said: "Hold up"; another,
"Come on"; another, "Plenty of time . . . House . . . till Tom stops
ringing"; and another, clearer than the rest, "D'you know I feel most
unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute," and there appeared at my
window the face I knew to be Sebastian's -- but not as I had formerly seen
it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing
eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick.
It was not unusual for dinner parties to end in that way; there was in
fact a recognized tariff on such occasions for the comfort of the scout; we
were all learning, by trial and error, to carry our wine. There was also a
kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Sebastian's choice, in his
extremity, of an open window. But, when all is said, it remained an
unpropitious meeting.
His friends bore him to the gate and, in a few minutes, his host, an
amiable Etonian of my year, returned to apologize. He, too, was tipsy and
his explanations were repetitive and, towards the end, tearful. "The wines
were too various," he said; "it was neither the quality nor the quantity
that was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of
the matter. To understand all is to forgive all."
"Yes," I said, but it was with a sense of grievance that I faced Lunt's
reproaches next morning.
"A couple of jugs of mulled claret between the five of you," Lunt said,
"and this had to happen. Couldn't even get to the window. Those that can't
keep it down are better without it."
"It wasn't one of my party. It was someone from out of college."
"Well, it's just as nasty clearing it up, whoever it was."
"There's five shillings on the sideboard."
"So I saw and thank you, but I'd rather not have the money and not have
the mess, any morning."
I took my gown and left him to his task. I still frequented the lecture
room in those days, and it was after eleven when I returned to college. I
found my room full of flowers; what looked like, and, in fact, was, the
entire day's stock of a market-stall stood in every conceivable vessel in
every part of the room. Lunt was secreting the last of them in brown paper
preparatory to taking them home.
"Lunt, what is all this?"
"The gentleman from last night, sir, he left a note for you."
The note was written in conte crayon on a whole sheet of my choice
Whatman H.P. drawing paper: I am very contrite. Aloysius won't speak to me
until he sees I am forgiven, so please come to luncheon to-day. Sebastian
Flyte. It was typical of him, I reflected, to assume I knew where he lived;
but then, I did know. '
"A most amusing gentleman, I'm sure it's quite a pleasure to clean up
after him. I take it you're lunching out, sir. I told Mr. Collins and Mr.
Partridge so--they wanted to have their commons in here with you."
"Yes, Lunt, lunching out."
That luncheon party -- for party it proved to be -- was the beginning
of a new epoch in my life, but its details are dimmed for me and confused by
so many others, almost identical with it, that succeeded one another that
term and the next, like romping cupids in a Renaissance frieze.
I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a
tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told
me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days,
and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that
here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I
knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden,
which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey
city.
Sebastian lived at Christ Church, high in Meadow Buildings. He was
alone when I came, peeling a plover's egg taken from the large nest of moss
in the centre of the table.
"I've just counted them," he said. "There were five each and two over,
so I'm having the two. I'm unaccountably hungry to-day. I put myself
unreservedly in the hands of Dolbear and Goodall, and feel so drugged that
I've begun to believe that the whole of yesterday evening was a dream.
Please don't wake me up."
He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme
youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.
His room was filled with a strange jumble of objects -- a harmonium in
a gothic case, an elephant's-foot waste-paper basket, a dome of wax fruit,
two disproportionately large Sevres vases, framed drawings by Daumier --
made all the more incongruous by the austere college furniture and the large
luncheon table. His chimney-piece was covered with cards of invitation from
London hostesses.
"That beast Hobson has put Aloysius in the bedder," he said. "Perhaps
it's as well as there wouldn't have been any plovers' eggs for him. D'you
know, Hobson hates Aloysius? I wish I had a scout like yours. He was sweet
to me this morning where some people might have been quite strict."
The party assembled. There were three Etonian freshmen, mild, elegant,
detached young men who had all been to a dance in London the night before,
and spoke of it as though it had been the funeral of a near but unloved
kinsman. Each as he came into the room made first for the plovers' eggs,
then noticed Sebastian and then myself with a polite lack of curiosity which
seemed to say: "We should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest that
you never met us before."
"The first this year," they said. "Where do you get them?"
"Mummy sends them from Brideshead. They always lay early for her."
When the eggs were gone and we were eating the lobster Newburg, the
last guest arrived.
"My dear," he said, "I couldn't get away before. I was lunching with my
p-p-preposterous tutor. He thought it very odd my leaving when I did. I told
him I had to change for F-f-footer."
From the moment he arrived the newcomer took charge, talking in a
luxurious, self-taught stammer; teasing; caricaturing the guests at his
previous luncheon; telling lubricious anecdotes of Paris and Berlin; and
doing more than entertain -- transfiguring the party, shedding a vivid,
false light of eccentricity upon everyone so that the three prosaic Etonians
seemed suddenly to become creatures of his fantasy.
This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the "aesthete" par
excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville, a young
man who seemed to me, then, fresh from the sombre company of the College
Essay Society, ageless as a lizard, as foreign as a Martian. He had been
pointed out to me often in the streets, as he moved with his own peculiar
stateliness, as though he had not fully accustomed himself to coat and
trousers and was more at his ease in heavy, embroidered robes; I had heard
his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him,
under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously, like
the fine piece of cookery he was.
After luncheon he stood on the balcony with a megaphone which had
appeared surprisingly among the bric-a-brac of Sebastian's room, and in
languishing, sobbing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the
sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.
" 'I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all,'" he sobbed to them from the
Venetian arches --
"Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead. . . ."
And then, stepping lightly into the room, "How I have surprised them!
All boatmen are Grace Darlings to me."
We sat on sipping Cointreau while the mildest and most detached of the
Etonians sang "Home they brought Her warrior dead" to his own accompaniment
on the harmonium.
It was four o'clock before we broke up.
Anthony Blanche was the first to go. He took formal and complimentary
leave of each of us in turn. To Sebastian he said: "My dear, I should like
to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion," and to me: "I
think it's perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do
you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivy you out like an old
st-t-toat."
The others left soon after him. I rose to go with them, but Sebastian
said: "Have some more Cointreau," so I stayed and later he said, "I must go
to the Botanical Gardens."
"Why?"
"To see the ivy."
It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as
we walked under the walls of Merton.
"I've never been to the Botanical Gardens," I said.
"Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There's a beautiful arch
there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don't know
where I should be without the Botanical Gardens."
When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had
left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me
before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be
real. Was it the screen? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.
It was the end of the screen. Lunt never liked it, and after a few days
he took it away, to an obscure refuge he had under the stairs, full of mops
and buckets.
That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it
came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade
of the high elms, watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the
branches.
-
"But I was in search of love in those days,
and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that
here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I
knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden,
which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey
city."
**sigh**
-
I guess I was too young then. I found the book tedious and the series even moreso. I think the reason I did was because it seemed that Waugh was spending way too much time avoiding coming out and telling the reader that Sebastian was GAY GAY GAY, and I lost patience with it. And the series was just as coy as the book in doing the same thing.
I had the same problem with 'A Separate Peace.'
So I don't think i'll be going to the movies for this one!!
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OT, but here's Parker Stevenson with John Heyl in A Separate Peace (1972):
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2084/2512320525_9e1d4976cf.jpg?v=0)
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--I found the book tedious and the series even moreso. I think the reason I did was because it seemed that Waugh was spending way too much time avoiding coming out and telling the reader that Sebastian was GAY GAY GAY, and I lost patience with it. And the series was just as coy as the book in doing the same thing--So I don't think i'll be going to the movies for this one!!
I will say on Evelyn Waugh's behalf (not that he needs it), that Waugh, ultra-conservative reactionary, snob, something of a monster, was never coy. In the upperclass hothouse of Oxford, Homosexuality with a capital 'H' was, shall we say, assumed.
Sebastian (Waugh's creation) is obviously gay. He is a seriously determined alcoholic. But he is also, literally, a living saint. And Waugh, scathingly, mordantly funny about everything else, is serious about God, religion, and the reality of living saints.
Brideshead may not be your cup of tea, which is valid. In any case, definitely do not see the new film as it is clearly bad. But the book is not tedious--it is not very long, and it is often quite slyly funny. The Granada series is long (it needs it be), but it is not tedious either--it is slow and sumptuous and elegaic. A jewel, in fact. A piece of art.
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meadow_Building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meadow_Building)
The Meadow Buildings
(http://photos.igougo.com/images/p223802-Oxford-The_Meadow_Buildings.jpg)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Meadow Building (known as "Meadows" to undergraduates) is part of Christ Church, Oxford, England, looking out onto Christ Church Meadow. It was built in 1863 to the designs of Sir Thomas Deane in the Venetian style (favoured by the famous Christ Church art historian John Ruskin). Single rooms in the Meadow Building look out over either the college or the Christ Church Meadow, although originally, college undergraduates would be given a suite of rooms with views overlooking both sides. Recent building work has converted most of these rooms to ensuite while leaving one staircase, which is primarily non-residential, as was.
When it was first built, the relative distance of the Meadow Building from the more fashionable Peckwater and Canterbury Quads meant that it was considered the least desirable accommodation in college.
Literary references
"So I found myself installed in delightfully spacious rooms within the Victorian wing of an elegant Tudor college, with the beauty of the Christ Church Meadow spread panoramically on the other side of my window panes. The Meadows block was more tranquil in spirit than the rowdier atmosphere of Peckwater." The Marquess of Bath refers to the college in 1953, Strictly Private (2001)
"I discovered the huge and ungainly pile of Ruskinian Gothic known as Meadow Building, where I would be spending the next two years. […] Blissfully ignorant of the social geography of the House, I did not realize that I had been relegated to the furthest outpost of the college demesne. From the lofty vantage point of the Old Etonians and Old Harrovians who lived in Peckwater and Canterbury I might just as well have been relegated to Siberia. My sitting room lay on the top floor of the last entry in Meadow Building." L Perry Curtis refers to the college in 1955, Christ Church Matters (2005)
"Sebastian lived at Christ Church, high in Meadow Buildings. He was alone when I came, peeling a plover's egg taken from the large nest of moss in the centre of the table." Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945)
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Some IMDb trivia regarding the original TV series:
Originally, producer Derek Granger asked Anthony Andrews to play the role of Charles Ryder. Andrews, however, felt he was better suited for the part of Sebastian Flyte. Jeremy Irons, Granger's first choice for Sebastian, preferred to play Ryder, so the two actors swapped roles.
The ship in the storm scenes is actually unused footage from The Poseidon Adventure (1972). [edit: this seems like a joke.]
Laurence Olivier was offered his choice of roles in either Lord Marchmain or Edward Ryder (which ultimately went to John Gielgud). Olivier picked Lord Marchmain, but later regretted the choice as he realized that Edward Ryder was actually a much stronger role.
Sebastian's teddy bear, Aloysius, was based on a real one called Archie which belonged to John Betjeman, one of Evelyn Waugh's friends from his days at Oxford university.
***
Also, I remember hearing, perhaps on the DVD extras, that because of a lengthy tech strike, filming was considerably delayed. It was during that time that Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom became available. Also, the script was re-thought: rather than the original 6-hour length, it was decided to essentially film the whole story, all 13 hours. I believe this was when they included Charles's voice-over, essentially verbatim from the novel.
-
Just like Charles, I find myself recalling my very first viewing of "Brideshead Revisited".
Just having come out, and fallen in love, winter 1982, I was home from college for the weekend, freshman year. Generally bored, I turned on the TV, a little black-and-white set in the kitchen, and was dumbstruck.
There, I saw two very handsome young men walking in a garden, arm in arm. I was hooked, not even knowing what it was. Consulting the TV guide, I saw that it was being repeated later that evening, so I watched it from the start. The language, the visuals, the performances. Ahh.
As I didn't own a TV in college, I had to scramble every Monday night to borrow one. To my surprise, my straight roommate even got caught up and wanted to watch it with me. "Is your show on tonight?" he'd say.
My bf even got a teddy bear he called "Ignatius". LOL.
In those days, I had hoped for a happy ending for Charles and Sebastian. :(
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Brideshead may not be your cup of tea, which is valid. In any case, definitely do not see the new film as it is clearly bad. But the book is not tedious--it is not very long, and it is often quite slyly funny. The Granada series is long (it needs it be), but it is not tedious either--it is slow and sumptuous and elegaic. A jewel, in fact. A piece of art.
I'm afraid it's not my cup of Earl Grey either, none of it. While I can appreciate, intellectually and in the abstract, what a work of art the old series is, and despite being the Anglophile that I am, I find that whole British-aristocracy-between-the-wars scene crashingly boring. And characters with names like Flyte and Marchmain make me want to leave the room.
However, thanks to Paul's post referencing A Separate Peace, I got to wondering, Who is John Heyl? I'd never heard of him, but just look at him in that photo with Parker Stevenson! Unfortunately, all ImDB has on him is the one reference to A Separate Peace. No biographical information, nothing. I shall have to do a Google search, I guess.
-
However, thanks to Paul's post referencing A Separate Peace, I got to wondering, Who is John Heyl? I'd never heard of him, but just look at him in that photo with Parker Stevenson! Unfortunately, all ImDB has on him is the one reference to A Separate Peace. No biographical information, nothing. I shall have to do a Google search, I guess.
I believe IMDb said that all the actors except Parker Stevenson were actual students at Exeter.
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I believe IMDb said that all the actors except Parker Stevenson were actual students at Exeter.
Could be. I just searched for the name. I didn't check what IMDb had to say about the film. I guess he didn't go on to a film career. More's the pity. ...
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A review from Variety:
by Dennis Harvey
(http://a330.g.akamai.net/7/330/23382/20080721170017/www.variety.com/graphics/photos/reviewb/rbridesheadrevisited.jpg)
A finely wrought, Merchant-Ivory-style Brit-lit adaptation rather curiously unloaded by Miramax smack amid Stateside summer tentpole season -- just before fall fest season and the unveiling of awards contenders -- "Brideshead Revisited" offers lush and compelling drama drawn from Evelyn Waugh's beloved novel. Purists may blanch at the screenplay's changes to the source material's narrative fine points, but its spirit survives intact. Fond memories of the 1981 miniseries likely will only help prod curious fans into theaters, suggesting respectable B.O. on both sides of the Atlantic.
Scenarists Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock (like director Julian Jarrold, all veteran adapters of literary and historical tales for film and TV) have created a few bold shortcuts that will invariably distress folks who justifiably view the Granada TV mini as one of the truest page-to-screen transfers ever. But then, it had 11 hours in which to reproduce every nuance. And this version's changes, in the end, serve to communicate the novel's complexities within a viable, theatrical-friendly format without ever appearing to rush or coarsen its general arc. (Still, one wouldn't guess this from the film's trailer, which strains to make it look like a pulse-pounding intrigue in period duds, a la "Vanity Fair" or "The Scarlet Letter.")
Allowing auds sufficient retro-aristo-lifestyle sumptuousness for their dollar, yet exhibiting admirable, intelligent directorial restraint, this "Brideshead" is mainstream arthouse fare par excellence. Tale is framed, as in the novel, by the stationing of Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) as a WWII British Army officer in a lavish country estate-turned-temporary military base -- a location he's visited before under very different circumstances.
Bulk of the narrative is set earlier, in the 1920s, as middle-class Charles commences studies at Oxford and falls into the company of fellow student Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), whose impulsive hedonism and affectionate nature charm him. When Sebastian shows Charles the extraordinary ancestral grounds he grew up in, the latter is further seduced by such sheer magnificence.
But as Sebastian is too well mannered to say outright, Brideshead Castle is, for him, a prison of instilled guilt, to be escaped by any means possible -- which, in his case, turns out to be alcohol. With Sebastian's coolly alluring sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) also in residence, the fun comes to a sharp end with the dreaded arrival of their mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) -- a devout, most bitterly husband-abandoned Catholic.
In the hope that the visitor's solidity might steady her son, Lady Marchmain encourages him to accompany the sibs on a trip to visit their father, Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), and his mistress, Cara (Greta Scacchi), in Venice. This is another idyllic time, though the growing attraction between Charles and Julia deals Sebastian a crushing blow that sends him sliding further into alcoholism.
As the years move onward, Sebastian, Charles and Julia drift far from one another, yet remain bound by conflicted secular yearnings and sacred guilt.
While the film offers the closest thing to a gay love story in mainstream cinema since "Brokeback Mountain," it wouldn't be quite right to call the Charles-Sebastian dynamic homoerotic: True to the novel, what Cara terms a "romantic friendship" is tangible more as true love than as mere sexual attraction, no matter that Sebastian suffers the stigma of feeling both.
Unfolding at a pace that never feels rushed despite the compacted runtime, pic clearly portrays the Flyte offspring as forever crippled by the sense of sin imbued in them by their mother. Yet what plays for some time as a fairly harsh condemnation of oppressive religious morality finally becomes a poignant acknowledgement of faith, encapsulating Charles' new attitude toward it in a beautifully low-key close.
Goode provides a fine center of gravity as the middle-class tourist in heady but toxic upper-class realms. Thompson superbly etches a complex, eventually tragic portrait in her relatively few scenes.
Whishaw and Atwell are fine, but leave perhaps a slightly less distinctive stamp on their roles than the series' Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick, respectively.
Without tipping into excess eye candy, the design contribs are all one could wish for, handsomely captured in Jess Hall's widescreen lensing. Adrian Johnson's graceful score is another notable plus in a package that, in every department, approaches the material with understated respect rather than stylistic flash.
Reportedly, Paul Bettany, Jude Law and Jennifer Connelly were attached until helmer David Yates was poached for last year's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." One can say, in this case, that settling for the B team turned out well.
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However, thanks to Paul's post referencing A Separate Peace, I got to wondering, Who is John Heyl? I'd never heard of him, but just look at him in that photo with Parker Stevenson! Unfortunately, all ImDB has on him is the one reference to A Separate Peace. No biographical information, nothing. I shall have to do a Google search, I guess.
Jeff--just for you!
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3117/2513146098_02fcd48e2a.jpg?v=0)
John Heyl and Parker Stevenson
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First, I thought we could set the mood--with Geoffrey Burgon's Brideshead Theme; click and listen:
http://www.imeem.com/agripina/music/HEADCEXH/geoffrey_burgon_brideshead_theme/ (http://www.imeem.com/agripina/music/HEADCEXH/geoffrey_burgon_brideshead_theme/)
Ah. That's better.
Now:
--winter 1982: I turned on the TV, a little black-and-white set in the kitchen, and was dumbstruck. There, I saw two very handsome young men walking in a garden, arm in arm. I was hooked, not even knowing what it was. Consulting the TV guide, I saw that it was being repeated later that evening, so I watched it from the start. The language, the visuals, the performances. Ahh.
Paul, I'm about ten years older than you. I had read the book, and, in fact, had been anxiously waiting some time for the Granada production to start. But--Yes. Exactly.
[Anthony] Andrews, however, felt he was better suited for the part of Sebastian Flyte. Jeremy Irons, [Derek] Granger's first choice for Sebastian, preferred to play Ryder, so the two actors swapped roles.
Thank god!
Laurence Olivier was offered his choice of roles in either Lord Marchmain or Edward Ryder (which ultimately went to John Gielgud). Olivier picked Lord Marchmain, but later regretted the choice as he realized that Edward Ryder was actually a much stronger role.
Again, thank god--that this time the actors didn't switch!
Also, I remember hearing, perhaps on the DVD extras, that because of a lengthy tech strike, filming was considerably delayed. It was during that time that Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom became available. Also, the script was re-thought: rather than the original 6-hour length, it was decided to essentially film the whole story, all 13 hours. I believe this was when they included Charles's voice-over, essentially verbatim from the novel.
Olivier and Bloom were--well, perfect. As in Brokeback, the Stars Were Aligned (and I don't mean film stars).
But now we are to see a two-hour version--with Julia inserted into the Venice sequence?? What can one say, except--ugh!
Reportedly, Paul Bettany, Jude Law and Jennifer Connelly were attached until helmer David Yates was poached for last year's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." One can say, in this case, that settling for the B team turned out well.
Paul Bettany, Jude Law and Jennifer Connelly? As two Oxford undergraduates and sister/chum? That must have been the 'G Team'--'G' for Geriatric.
As for the actual troupe, with Goode, Whishaw and Atwell--it's 'B' for Better Luck Next Time...
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First, I thought we could set the mood--with Geoffrey Burgon's Brideshead Theme; click and listen:
I love the arpeggios in the background. Sounds great, even on my computer.
Julia in Venice? A cheap trick to condense the story. Ugh is right.
Paul Bettany, Jude Law and Jennifer Connelly? As two Oxford undergraduates and sister/chum? That must have been the 'G Team'--'G' for Geriatric.
As for the actual troupe, with Goode, Whishaw and Atwell--it's 'B' for Better Luck Next Time...
I'm curious: who would your 'A' Team be? Or are you sticking with Irons, Andrews and Quick?
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Given my geriatric self, I have the nerve!
Actually, Andrews (b. 1948!), Irons (1948!) and Quick (1946!!) were pretty long in the tooth when the production started--even the 'child,' Phoebe Nicholls (1957), as the sainted Cordelia, was no child in 1980-1981.
IF some imaginary 'they' were to make another re-remake (and first I would think: why? ), I think it should be a very young, very talented cast, all contemporaries of one another, who are artificially aged as the story progresses, as Heath and Jake were cast in Brokeback by Ang's brilliance.
Interesting, though, in re-makes (in Wikipedia):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Andrews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Andrews)
[Andrews] recently said in an interview that "Remakes are often an excuse to associate young movie stars with a good title. They think it adds up to magic."
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Aww, thanks, John! :D
Jeff--just for you!
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3117/2513146098_02fcd48e2a.jpg?v=0)
John Heyl and Parker Stevenson
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Aww, thanks, John! :D
You're welcome!
(http://www.lakelandschools.us/lh/bosullivan/A%20Separate%20Peace%20Webquest_files/branch.gif)
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Here's a different take from the Village Voice:
Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited
By Ella Taylor
Wednesday, July 23rd 2008
Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited , George Orwell wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be... while holding untenable opinions.” Which is a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down, was also a social-climbing snob, an anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer, a hater of modernity and by extension (as anyone knows who has read The Loved One, his handy evisceration of the California funeral business) all things American.
Not that this deterred the millions of Americans who wolfed down the British television adaptation of Brideshead when it aired on PBS in 1981. Cruising right past the novel's crass Yank (disguised as a Canadian, but it was all the same to Waugh) who does business with the Nazis and sells his wife for a few paintings, just about every Anglophile I knew fell for the lovely country seat and its delicate-featured nobles dripping with diamonds, Catholic guilt and all. Personally, I never saw the point of stretching out this crisply written and none too long novel about England collapsing under the pressure of social change into a depressive 11-hour slog. A movie adaptation, even one passed through the pop filter of co-writer Andrew Davies, British TV's designated gatekeeper of all properties literary to the masses, sounds like much more fun. And though I can imagine Waugh rolling his eyes at the very idea of Brideshead Revisited as “a heartbreaking romantic epic,” this remake is, often inadvertently, closer to the novel's spirit than the sepulchral television series, albeit still not half as waggishly Waugh-ish as Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's delightfully naughty interpretation of Vile Bodies.
Adapted by Davies with Jeremy Brock, Brideshead isn't much of a story. Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), a wan young student who comes from trade, is taken up at Oxford by the feverishly gay and increasingly alcoholic aristocrat Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) and soon finds himself caught up in Sebastian's struggle with his intensely Catholic family. What it lacks in plot, however, is made up for in atmosphere and constant movement. As directed by Julian Jarrold (who already displayed impressive chops for jollying up the classics by bestowing a saucy love life on Jane Austen in Becoming Jane), Brideshead Revisited -revisited is a less gloomy affair than its predecessor, boasting better stately homes and gardens bathed in a warm chocolate glow, colorful trips abroad to Venice and Morocco, a marketably youthful cast, and broad winks at the novel's repressed homosexual attraction between Charles and Sebastian. Nothing wrong with any of that—Waugh was an observant creature of the Jazz Age he deplored.
If the movie strives and fails to redirect the erotic flow to the heterosexual love between Charles Ryder and Sebastian's sister, Julia Flyte, so, too, did Waugh, almost certainly a closeted homosexual inhibited by his conversion to Catholicism. As Julia, Hayley Atwell has none of TV-Julia Diana Quick's tortured inner radiance, and when she and Charles finally rip off their silken evening clothes aboard a cruise liner, you want to laugh, or look away. In the end nothing that goes on in this youthful triangle proves as compelling as the great, sick love story between the teddy-clutching Sebastian (Whishaw is show-stoppingly queeny and heart-stoppingly vulnerable) and his mummy, an ice-floe nicely understated by Emma Thompson as a woman at once energized and doomed by her devotion to Catholic orthodoxy.
Waugh, whose cruelty to others in life and literature was legendary, was merciless in taking down this rigidly controlling woman and the son she destroys. But the truly malevolent power of Brideshead Revisited is his identification with what she stood for — a literal reading of the Vatican texts, the preservation of ancient tradition, and keeping her snooty class free of contamination by interlopers like Charles — and Waugh himself. Late in the day, Waugh turns a pitiless, accusing gaze on Charles' unacknowledged motives for worming his way into the Marchmain household, and makes him over as a species of villain. You can't read this switcheroo in the 21st-century without revulsion at the self-laceration with which Waugh punished himself for his own pent-up sexuality and his yearning to join a class he was not born into, and at his retreat into unbending religious orthodoxy. Still, though Brideshead Revisited the movie is far from deep, you have to admire the way it refrains from seizing the day for a post-modern lecture on the perils of fundamentalism, and confines itself to the disturbing vision of Evelyn Waugh.
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Some photos courtesy of afterelton.com:
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/bridesheadtree.jpg)
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/bridesheadsebastianboat.jpg)
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/bridesheadfamily.jpg)
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And a few of Matthew Goode, for the boy-crazy among us:
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodestanding.jpg)
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodematch.jpg)
From Match Point
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodelying.jpg)
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodelookout.jpg)
From The Lookout
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodewatchmen.jpg)
As Ozymandias in The Watchmen
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Very nice photos! I'd much prefer see Matthew Goode any day rather then any more semi-educated, wrongheaded reviews like the last (Charles Ryder in trade? Uh, no--)
So, on that note:
(http://www.holandesa.blogger.com.br/chasinglibertypubj.jpg)
(http://img387.imageshack.us/img387/5326/matthewgoode37js.jpg)
(http://bp3.blogger.com/_3ITLi-l_ZRU/R5JHQMs3d8I/AAAAAAAAACI/5JWTUFQs9Q8/s320/goode.jpg)
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And a few of Matthew Goode, for the boy-crazy among us:
Who, me? He wouldn't have to ask me twice to marry him. ... ;D
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodestanding.jpg)
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodematch.jpg)
From Match Point
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodelying.jpg)
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodelookout.jpg)
From The Lookout
(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/matthewgoodewatchmen.jpg)
As Ozymandias in The Watchmen
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This movie will surely start a "dandy" fashion trend, I'm salivating just looking at some of the boys' outfits!
It's a good weekend for costume dramas with the opening of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED (REVISiTED) & Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS.
Here's a nice shot of Ben, so he doesn't feel slighted. ;)
(http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w197/oilgun/ABC%20Movies/Ben-Whishaw-01.jpg)
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Aha, so that's Ben on your avatar, Gil!
(http://www.perfumemovie.com/assets/images/downloads/wallpaper_3_1280.jpg)
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I'm going tonight, prepared for whatever. I'll report back.
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(http://www.afterelton.com/sites/www.afterelton.com/files/bridesheadfamily.jpg)
In this photo it looks to me like Emma Thompson is morphing into Diana Rigg (the cheeks getting hollower and hollower).
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I'm going tonight, prepared for whatever. I'll report back.
The reviews I've read have been good so it should be a good time, I think I'll see it tomorrow. And yes that's Ben's nose on my avatar. I loved PERFUME and became a Ben fan after seeing it.
(http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w197/oilgun/ABC%20Movies/Ben-Whishaw-02.jpg)
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The reviews I've read have been good so it should be a good time, I think I'll see it tomorrow.
And yes that's Ben's nose on my avatar. I loved PERFUME and became a Ben fan after seeing it.
(http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w197/oilgun/ABC%20Movies/Ben-Whishaw-02.jpg)
I've seen Ben on stage in London (the first production of His Dark Materials at the National Theatre in 2003) and his very young Hamlet (directed by Trevor Nunn at the Old Vic in 2004).
I didn't see Perfume. It just seemed--hmm. Ben is an odd egg. Not every one's cup of tea--not mine, anyway, that's for sure. But that's what makes this old world turn around, no?
Good luck, all, with Brideshead. I can't believe it will be even slightly worthwhile, but--maybe the costumes are interesting.
And there's always Oxford--and Christ Church!
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Good luck, all, with Brideshead. I can't believe it will be even slightly worthwhile, but--maybe the costumes are interesting.
It always comes down to one of two things, doesn't it? Sex, or clothes. ...
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I've seen Ben on stage in London (the first production of His Dark Materials at the National Theatre in 2003) and his very young Hamlet (directed by Trevor Nunn at the Old Vic in 2004).
I didn't see Perfume. It just seemed--hmm. Ben is an odd egg. Not every one's cup of tea--not mine, anyway, that's for sure. But that's what makes this old world turn around, no?
Good luck, all, with Brideshead. I can't believe it will be even slightly worthwhile, but--maybe the costumes are interesting.
And there's always Oxford--and Christ Church!
I'm curious to hear why you think it will suck. Andrew Davies co-wrote the screenplay and he's done some interesting stuff in the past. I just watched THE LINE OF BEAUTY, the TV mini series he adapted from the Hollinghurst novel and it was amazing!
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Personally, Sebastian will always be Anthony Andrews for me.Yet another teen crush.
I cannot imagine anyone else in the role.Well actualy I can.The thought of Heath, in English period clothes of that time, wandering through the dreaming spires of Oxford, or punting on the river. Very big sigh. I really love that period of time in English history, particularly that class of people.It's all so louche and pointless and so becomes all the more decadent.
Wouldn't we all love to have just one perfect summer like that.
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Just got home. Time to scribble a review.
Brideshead Revved: All revved up and no place to go.
Opening night at the splendiferously Art Deco Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. Just a few dour-looking Anglophiles in line behind my friend Vin and me. Not a good sign. No previews for some reason; straight to the film.
I expected that condensing the novel would be a challenge. It started and ended with wartime Charles, but went backwards before going forwards, even inexplicably repeating a scene on the ocean liner.
Very rushed, very loud at the beginning. So rushed, that none of the relationships made any sense. There was no time for the attractions to develop, and even so, no chemistry among the triangulaires. Lots of fake, coarse dialogue not from the novel. Heavy-handed symbolism at every turn: close-up on the dropped rosary; close-up on Julia's crucifix. We get it, they're Catholics!
Strangely, the film slowed down in the last reel, slow like a diamond-encrusted turtle.
Overly dark interior shots, odd camera angles, lots of statuary framed against the sky. It seemed that half the film was the same close-up of Matthew Goode, showing the same face with the same expression. Granted it's a nice face, with big greenish eyes. But it managed to convey absolutely nothing. His Charles was very unsympathetic; always peering in doorways, he seems as shallow as a gold-digger.
Poor Ben Whishaw. (Sorry, Gil.) His Sebastian is neither cute nor charming. Rather, he's slight, high-pitched, whiny, sing-songy and pathetic. So he doesn't really have too far to fall. The kiss was completely chaste and forgettable.
Hayley Atwell as Julia. Hmm, well, at least she looked like she could be Ben's sister.
Emma Thompson surprised me: she was not the she-devil I had expected from the trailer; rather the opposite. Hers was the most subtle performance, even while uttering some awful lines.
I liked the guy who played Rex (Jonathan Cake). He made a great and believable cad.
The rest of the cast were caricature cameos; most were given 8.2 seconds. Even Anthony Blanche was boring.
Directing: choppy.
Script: coarse, obvious, no poetry.
Cinematography: annoying.
Cast: unsubtle, no passion, no chemistry.
Costumes: some strange choices, but I liked Sebastian's red pyjamas.
Music: maybe the best thing.
Castle Howard: too many scenes at the damned fountain.
Venice: completely wasted.
Miscellaneous: why were there giant cargo planes landing in Brideshead's backyard?
My friend Vin's review: "why bother?"
Summary: Brideshead Reader's Digest.
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My friend Vin's review: "why bother?"
Summary: Brideshead Reader's Digest.
Ha!
Good for you, Paul.
Jerrold (the director) is an ass.
As for Mr Davies, the 'screenwriter god,' well--after recently re-writing Sense and Sensibility (2008) and A Room with a View (2007) (dear god in heaven, why?), maybe he needs to write something original, for once, to clean out the pipes, so to speak. Or give it a rest.
(IMHO, obviously.)
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Oh dear. :(
Guess I'll just hang onto my memories of Jeremy and Anthony, Claire and Sir Larry. :-\
Thanks for scouting it out and writing such a perceptive, though damning, review, Paul. :-*
P.S. - I like Jonathan Cake (Johnnycake, heh!), too. He was very good (and hot) as a gladiator in "Empire" on TV a few years back.
*waves to John*
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*waves to John*
Hi, Meryl! Take a look--I posted the photos of our lovely outing today! Thanks again! J
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From The New York Times Video:
Screen Test: Matthew Goode
Lynn Hirschberg speaks with Matthew Goode, one of the stars of the movie version of "Brideshead Revisited."
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=130dffc247754ca375dadf61f2b9f5b3211080e3 (http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=130dffc247754ca375dadf61f2b9f5b3211080e3)
(He's actually adorable. He thinks so too, but regardless. The video is 5:28.)
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Just got home. Time to scribble a review.
Brideshead Revved: All revved up and no place to go.
Opening night at the splendiferously Art Deco Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. Just a few dour-looking Anglophiles in line behind my friend Vin and me. Not a good sign. No previews for some reason; straight to the film.
I expected that condensing the novel would be a challenge. It started and ended with wartime Charles, but went backwards before going forwards, even inexplicably repeating a scene on the ocean liner.
Very rushed, very loud at the beginning. So rushed, that none of the relationships made any sense. There was no time for the attractions to develop, and even so, no chemistry among the triangulaires. Lots of fake, coarse dialogue not from the novel. Heavy-handed symbolism at every turn: close-up on the dropped rosary; close-up on Julia's crucifix. We get it, they're Catholics!
Strangely, the film slowed down in the last reel, slow like a diamond-encrusted turtle.
Overly dark interior shots, odd camera angles, lots of statuary framed against the sky. It seemed that half the film was the same close-up of Matthew Goode, showing the same face with the same expression. Granted it's a nice face, with big greenish eyes. But it managed to convey absolutely nothing. His Charles was very unsympathetic; always peering in doorways, he seems as shallow as a gold-digger.
Poor Ben Whishaw. (Sorry, Gil.) His Sebastian is neither cute nor charming. Rather, he's slight, high-pitched, whiny, sing-songy and pathetic. So he doesn't really have too far to fall. The kiss was completely chaste and forgettable.
Hayley Atwell as Julia. Hmm, well, at least she looked like she could be Ben's sister.
Emma Thompson surprised me: she was not the she-devil I had expected from the trailer; rather the opposite. Hers was the most subtle performance, even while uttering some awful lines.
I liked the guy who played Rex (Jonathan Cake). He made a great and believable cad.
The rest of the cast were caricature cameos; most were given 8.2 seconds. Even Anthony Blanche was boring.
Directing: choppy.
Script: coarse, obvious, no poetry.
Cinematography: annoying.
Cast: unsubtle, no passion, no chemistry.
Costumes: some strange choices, but I liked Sebastian's red pyjamas.
Music: maybe the best thing.
Castle Howard: too many scenes at the damned fountain.
Venice: completely wasted.
Miscellaneous: why were there giant cargo planes landing in Brideshead's backyard?
My friend Vin's review: "why bother?"
Summary: Brideshead Reader's Digest.
Yikes! Maybe I'll skip this one and see THE LAST MISTRESS instead! :o
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Oh dear. :(
Guess I'll just hang onto my memories of Jeremy and Anthony, Claire and Sir Larry. :-\
Thanks for scouting it out and writing such a perceptive, though damning, review, Paul. :-*
P.S. - I like Jonathan Cake (Johnnycake, heh!), too. He was very good (and hot) as a gladiator in "Empire" on TV a few years back.
*waves to John*
O.K Methinks I will give this one a miss. I loved the original T.V series.
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Well I 'm just getting back from seeing it. Maybe my expectations were so lowered by Paul's scathing review but I rather enjoyed it. Then again, I 've only seen maybe two episodes of the TV series so I didn't have that baggage to influence me. It's not a great movie by any means, the last third seemed to drag while the beginning felt rushed. and the music was ridiculously loud and intrusive which gave the film an unfortunate kitchy tone at times. I don't think I'm a mindless fanboy but I actually liked Ben Whishaw's performance, in fact, I thought the movie suffered whenever his Sebastian was absent.
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Well I 'm just getting back from seeing it. Maybe my expectations were so lowered by Paul's scathing review but I rather enjoyed it. Then again, I 've only seen maybe two episodes of the TV series so I didn't have that baggage to influence me. It's not a great movie by any means, the last third seemed to drag while the beginning felt rushed. and the music was ridiculously loud and intrusive which gave the film an unfortunate kitchy tone at times. I don't think I'm a mindless fanboy but I actually liked Ben Whishaw's performance, in fact, I thought the movie suffered whenever his Sebastian was absent.
Mindless, no. ;)
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Mindless, no. ;)
With all the hate directed at the movie on this thread, even from some who have't seen it, I have a feeling that it's not so much MY judgement that has been clouded. ;D
I thought Ben Whishaw's Sebastian was adorably vulnerable and really conveyed his emotions, I really could feel his heart breaking.
(http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w197/oilgun/ABC%20Movies/brideshead-Ben.jpg)
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I had only seen Ben in I'm Not There , where he was just a talking head, didn't get to do much.
Now I'd be interested in seeing him in Perfume .
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Another review--this one from Salon:
(http://images.salon.com/src/salon_logo.png)
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/25/brideshead_revisited/ (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/25/brideshead_revisited/)
"Brideshead Revisited"
(http://images.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/25/brideshead_revisited/story.jpg)
Felicity Jones as Cordelia Flyte, Hayley Atwell as Julia Flyte, Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain and Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder in "Brideshead Revisited."
No expense has been spared in this lavish, streamlined adaptation, but is there such a thing as too much good taste?
By Louis Bayard
July 25, 2008 | Human figures may be glimpsed amid the expensively furnished wastes of "Brideshead Revisited," but I admit I lost sight of them for whole stretches. There was so much ... stuff ... to look at. Those crimson swags in the drawing room windows -- have you ever seen damask drape like that? And OK, that twilit row of half-filled wine glasses on the stone ledge -- couldn't you sit and watch that for hours? And didn't the peacock look particularly smashing alongside the Bernini-esque fountain? Oh, and if I don't get those amber half-moon light fixtures for my birthday, please kill me. But not without burying me in that excellent cream morning suit, which is worn by ...
Right, right. Young Charles Ryder, an aspiring bourgeois artist, comes to Oxford and falls head over heels for one Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian, in addition to being cute and wealthy, is charmingly infantile -- he drags around a teddy bear named Aloysius -- but he's got a not-so-charming family waiting back at the ancestral manse. Older brother Bridey: insufferable prig. Older sister Julia: a hottie, but prevented by Catholic guilt from acting on her passions. Mom, aka Lady Marchmain: source of all that Catholic guilt. Dad, aka Lord Marchmain ... well, he's not there, actually, having long since fled to Venice, where he's now holding court with an Italian mistress.
The Marchmains are central to the scheme of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel for two very good reasons: They are rich, and they are Catholic. Waugh was always mistaking the elite for the elect, and in "Brideshead Revisited," this confusion is carried through to its natural end, muffling the author's barbed wit in a gauze of sentimental religiosity. The Marchmains, as presented, are plenty dysfunctional -- Mom's a prude and a control freak, Sebastian's a drunk, Julia's a narcissist -- but they're also meant to embody something fine and noble and true that is passing too quickly from the scene and leaving civilization in the hands of ... well, people who aren't Catholic and aren't beautiful and, worst of all, aren't from established families.
Everyday folks like us, in short, and I have to wonder what it is about the English mind that wants us to be nostalgic for people who would have abhorred us. The only way to make us care about the upper crust's agony, it seems, is to splash some of their money on us, and this director Julian Jarrold ("Becoming Jane") does in bucketfuls. Whether the action is unspooling across Oxford or Venice or Morocco or on an ocean liner or in a gallery, nothing good or bad happens without a week's worth of art direction. Doric arches, ivy-grown walls, baize doors, gilt cornices, plastered vaults: No expense has been spared, and no BBC lover has been alienated.
Indeed, the only real danger the film courts is comparison with the much-revered 1982 miniseries, starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. To refresh my own memory, I caught a couple of episodes this past week, and I was surprised by how glacially slow the thing was -- and how punishingly faithful to Waugh, with every last swatch of violet prose ("this cloistral hush ... the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning ...") lifted bodily onto the screen. None of that hyperliteracy for Andrew Davies, who is (with Jeremy Brock) the 2008 version's adapter. Davies has already made a career of whipping warhorses into shape -- "Pride and Prejudice," "Vanity Fair," "Middlemarch" -- and he performs much the same feat here. The drawn-out and hitherto-unresolved feelings between Charles and Sebastian are efficiently consummated with a single kiss. The sexual vibe between Charles and Julia is resolved every bit as efficiently on a Venetian balcony and later in a stateroom.
Davies' streamlining is, at one level, a mercy -- the story's Oxford section really doesn't have to be as long as an Oxford term -- but it leaves the actors with little to do but join the pageant of poses. They're good actors, too (although Ben Whishaw, as Sebastian, couldn't clean Anthony Andrews' wingtips), which is part of the problem. You keep wishing they could break through all that suffocating good taste and strut their stuff. Watching Matthew Goode squeeze himself into Charles' dinner jacket, for example, I found myself recalling the authentically terrifying spectacle he cut as the bank-heist mastermind in "The Lookout." Seeing Hayley Atwell peering out from under Julia's black bangs, I couldn't help longing for her wacked-out M.P.'s daughter in the British miniseries "The Line of Beauty." As for Emma Thompson, I'm not sure what possessed her to play the gorgonian zealot Lady Marchmain (the film strips the character of all the charm she has in the book), but I had a whole career's worth of happy Thompson memories to distract me from the mismatch.
Nothing, though, could distract me from this: The only way to get with "Brideshead," finally, is to be an Evelyn Waugh-style believer; the rest of us need not apply. The current film climaxes, just as the original story does, with the deathbed genuflection of a fallen Roman Catholic, and it concludes with the suggestion that even the agnostic/atheistic Charles has caught a little of that R.C. fever. Actually, it's quite a bit more than a suggestion: a blaze of holy light. We are to believe, apparently, that the Catholicism that has thwarted virtually every character's chance for happiness is really every character's salvation. How did such a grim and doctrinaire theology emanate from one of the great comic novelists in the English language? Waugh, it's important to remember, was a latecomer to his faith, and no one is more dedicated to defending a faith's articles than a convert.
Doctrine trumps all, and the result, as George Orwell wrote in another context, is "the cult of the sanctified sinner," which "seems to me to be frivolous, and underneath it there probably lies a weakening of belief, for when people really believed in Hell, they were not so fond of striking graceful attitudes on its brink. More to the point, by trying to clothe theological speculations in flesh and blood, it produces psychological absurdities." Even clothed in linen and flannel and tweed, the absurdities of "Brideshead Revisited" can never be entirely hidden.
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I saw Brideshead this afternoon and I quite liked it. It definitely wasn't the best film I've every seen, but I thought it was well done. I really like the book. And, I think that Sebastian was the best character and most interestingly portrayed character in the movie. Charles seems so flat... but then I think maybe he's supposed to see m flat even in the book.
Here's one particular reaction that you all will understand... as a Brokie I actually got a physical jolt the first time that I heard the Brokieism "it could be just like this always" uttered! And, then it came up again a second time later on!
And, I just have to say Hayley Atwell as Julia Flyte was absolutely drop dead gorgeous to me. I could look at her all day long.
:)
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I love the book and the television series and am looking forward to seeing the film. :D
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I saw it yesterday.
(http://s119.photobucket.com/albums/o126/kez4oz/Album%201/Brideshead2.jpg)
I have always loved the book, from the very first time I read it, way back in my teenage years. And I loved absolutely everything about the television series.
I enjoyed the film, but wasn't completely enraptured by it, as I was expecting. I wouldn't exactly say I was disappointed - I enjoyed it - but I didn't exactly love it either.
It was an entertaining diversion.
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I watched it last night on DVD and quite liked it. I had seen the original series way back when and read the novel shortly after, so I don't recall alot of detail.
I liked the casting, especially Charles and Sebastian. Especially Sebastian. he was that epicene beauty, tender and tremulous and oh so vulnerable. To me his character is the real center of the film. I think he represents youthful innocence, something Charles has, but like all of us, something that if not killed outright fades like a plucked flower, as does Sebastian. Innocence is something still present in us, like a memory and like a memory can be conjured and mourned. I think Charles represents the rising middle class between the Wars. He is entraced by the glamour of the aristocratic British past. It is something he aspires too, but can never possess. One can only be born to it, and born in the past a that. By stiving for that, Charles looses or rather abandons the one thing of real value: Sebastian.