Film adaptations of long and complex novels are dangerous territory for filmmakers, especially British period drama, when the two-plus hour cinema format must compete with the broader canvas provided by any number of outstanding television miniseries. Julian Jarrold faced a particularly daunting task given that Brideshead Revisited was adapted for television in 1981 in an 11-part series that ranks 10th on the list of the British Film Institute Greatest British Television Programs compiled in 2000.
It is interesting to note, according to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), that the producer and cast of the 1981 production requested that the original six-hour script by John Mortimer be expanded in order to do justice to the book. Slightly over two hours, Jarrold’s Brideshead proves woefully inadequate, and required the production team to take enormous liberties with the plot. It has not simply been condensed, but restructured in such a way as to almost disassociate it from the work it claims to be adapting.
The Brideshead of the title refers to the home of the Flyte family, of which Sebastian and Julia, the two middle children of four, become involved with Charles Ryder, a young artist from a middle-class background who falls in love with the privileged lifestyle and ultimately with the religion of the Flytes. Brideshead Castle is played in the film, as it was in the miniseries, by Castle Howard in North Yorkshire. It is surprising that even despite the advantages of the big screen, Jarrold fails to give this splendid pile, which is a central motif within the story, the same impact it had on television. There simply isn’t the time. It also underlines one of the central failings of the film, which otherwise is beautifully shot with costumes and sets that are likely to enchant anyone who enjoys British period drama. But splendor without context makes the whole thing ring a little hollow.
The characters too, suffer much the same fate, and this despite outstanding performances from the likes of Emma Thomson. The other senior members of the cast, Michael Gambon and Patrick Malahide, have lovely cameos, but Thomson, who is given a larger part in the film adaptation, struggles in yeoman fashion against becoming a caricature of the wicked mother. The younger members of the cast are almost uniformly indifferent, and Matthew Goode’s performance as Charles Ryder is nothing more than a watered-down version of Jeremy Iron’s performance in the miniseries.
Even taken independently and divorced from its links to the miniseries, Jarrold’s film seems a peculiar mix of love triangle and religious meditation. The romantic aspect may well have succeeded, but efforts to include the niceties of Roman Catholic theology, in this case the concept of God’s grace in an imperfect world, seems utterly bizarre. Recourse is made to some rather heavy-handed expository dialogue that has the quality of having seemingly been taken from an English literature primer.
It is also odd how Jarrold plays fast and loose with the social conventions of life in a great country house between the wars. One thinks fondly of the careful attention to period detail found in films such as The Remains of the Day (1993) and Gosford Park (2001), where a real sense of a world of aristocratic privilege and the gradually faltering but still ridged class system is seen in operation. Class, as much as religion, drives the story of Brideshead Revisited, but the production team seems at best casually interested in these, and feels happier pottering around with the conventional cliches of steamy and forlorn glances and melodramatic outbursts about love and sex.
Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited is pretty to look at, but inside it is empty, and the central concerns of the characters remain murky to the last. It is likely to sink into well-deserved oblivion, the 1981 miniseries remaining the definitive adaptation for the foreseeable future.
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