‘Brideshead Revisited’ is tasteful but bland

By Colin Covert

You say stately, I say stagnant. The lush big-screen version of “Brideshead Revisited” is mummified by good taste, swathed in so many layers of posh art direction and somnolent performance that its life force all but flickers out. A languid, melancholy teacup drama, it should be ingested only by fervent Anglophiles or when Seconal is unavailable.

The novel’s author, Evelyn Waugh, was an elitist worshipper of wealthy aristocratic layabouts; when he expired in 1966 one writer said he “died of snobbery.” His greatest novel is a reverie about the relationship of the narrator, middle-class artist Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), with the Flytes, an aristocratic Anglo-Catholic clan.

This loose adaptation opens during World War II as Capt. Ryder moves among squads of British troops billeted at Brideshead Manor, the Flyte family estate, which commoners would never have been permitted to enter a decade earlier. The film then travels wistfully back to days of hedonistic indulgence in the decadent 1920s and ’30s, as the odd but alluring family beguiled Charles.

He’s an impressionable Oxford undergrad when he meets Sebastian Flyte (Ben Wishaw), a rich, foppish classmate who regurgitates a bottle of champagne onto Charles’ dormitory room floor. Sebastian offers a social invitation by way of apology, and the mismatched pair become close friends. When Sebastian invites him to Brideshead, with its incomparable gallery of art and antiquities, Charles’ fascination with the upper class becomes little short of a fixation. Sebastian’s mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), is a smothering moralist; his nubile sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) draws Charles’ attention after his infatuation with Sebastian runs its course, ushering in the story’s second arc.

The theme of the piece is the passing of Imperial England’s established order, eroded by age, alcohol, social change and striving commoners with an understanding of how to get rich. Religious reflections run through the story, as Lady Marchmain’s sanctimonious strain of Catholicism forbids Charles, a divorced agnostic, from marrying Julia, but offers redemption for the characters’ myriad sins.

The story itself is unsatisfying, however. The film reaches its apex in the first third as we meet the eccentric characters and explore their world of deluxe debauchery. Neither section of the story provides a strong sense of closure and the acting, with a single exception, is unremarkable.

Whenever Emma Thompson appears onscreen, the film crackles with power. Here is a woman whose moralism could set her children on unalterable courses through life, who could send her husband (Michael Gambon) fleeing to Italy to live with a more yielding mistress. Thompson, who also produced, puts an immense energy into her performance. The rest, alas, is not top Flyte.