Brideshead Revisited.

"The images from the 11-episode mini-series are still vivid, 27 years later," writes Sarah Lyall in the New York Times. "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."

An accompanying slide show focuses on the work of costume designer Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh.

Updated through 7/25.

"[T]hough 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," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice.

"In the early 80s, you could still get away with telling a gay love story without daring to speak its name," notes Dan Callahan in Slant. "In 2008, there's no way to leave the Charles and Sebastian question open, which says a lot about social progress but also tells us why Waugh's story doesn't work anymore.... This new Brideshead takes a step in the right direction, but it's time some radical writer or filmmaker dared to leave out the dim Julia charade and let Charles and Sebastian play out their Isherwood/Auden Oxford love match to its full."

"Waugh, a Catholic convert, intended Brideshead to express his deep faith during a time of newly chic godlessness," notes Matt Prigge in the Philadelphia Weekly. "This Brideshead Revisited doesn't want to convert atheists into believers. Director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) and screenwriters Andrew Davies (the BBC's Pride and Prejudice) and Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland) even end their film one step sooner than the novel, which has Charles climactically kneeling down in a chapel, fully flip-flopped. Any adaptation ought to be its own thing, but the film's hesitation to follow its source to the end produces a confused, schizophrenic work."

"We pride ourselves in America on the absence of anything as rigid as the British class system Waugh depicts and dissects so brilliantly in Brideshead Revisited," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Still, I think we Americans have much to identify with in Mr Jarrold's insightful rendering of the material and spiritual aspirations in the life of an arriviste, no better, and no worse, than the great majority of our own young seekers after the American Dream. In this respect, Michael Gambon's death scene as a repentant Lord Marchmain encapsulates one of the most profound manifestations of the eternal struggle between faith and doubt it has ever been my privilege to witness."

"The new Brideshead Revisited had a turbulent production history." Tom Teodorczuk traces it in the New York Sun.

Update: "As The Dark Knight is comic-book nerd holy scripture, Brideshead Revisited serves the same purpose to fans of a genre I personally refer to as Fancy British People Sitting Around Staggeringly Huge Mansions Being Civilized," writes Dave White at MSNBC. "And Emma Thompson is that genre's Batman." Here, "Thompson's Lady Marchmain, the sternly rigid and suffocating Catholic matriarch of the titular ancestral home, is the drummer that keeps the slow, doomed beat of this remixed version." Sidebar: "Fancy British People Sitting Around Staggeringly Huge Mansions Being Civilized. I love movies about this sort of thing."

Updates, 7/25: "[T]edious, confused and banal," declares AO Scott. "It is not Mr Jarrold's fault that this landscape has been so heavily trodden over by others. But he and the screenwriters, Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, can be blamed for finding so little new or interesting to say about it, and for systematically stripping Waugh's novel of its telling nuances and provocative ideas."

Also in the New York Times, Ginia Bellafante revisits the 1981 series: "Brideshead Revisited was the sort of epic television event that gave rise to phrases like 'epic television event.' Among its legacies, it helped establish Jeremy Irons as a star.... Twenty-six years after its American broadcast, Brideshead Revisited, which was rereleased on DVD in 2006, is both pleasure and punishment, anachronism and forecast."

"Jarrold seems to believe that given the charged circumstances, little more than focusing on the apparel and furnishing is required," writes Leonard Klady at Movie City News. "His camera lingers and obsesses on accoutrements as if bored by the passions of the flesh and blood inhabitants of this antiquated realm. Thankfully the performers will have no truck with his bias and collectively comprise a viper's nest from which its protagonist will not emerge unbitten."

"To their credit, the filmmakers don't shy away from the novel's implication that Charles is in many ways a sort of human hand grenade that fate (or, per Waugh, grace) has rolled into a household full of blue bloods to hasten the job of self-destruction that they have already begun themselves," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Like many of the themes and tropes common to Waugh's novel and the Granada series, Charles's culpability is in the new Brideshead Revisited somewhere; one just has to find it during those rare moments when the film isn't busy making passionate love to the furniture."

"By focusing on Charles, Sebastian, and Julia, the film gives short shrift to some of the story's crucial historical context," argues Albert Williams in the Chicago Reader. "Waugh was writing about his own generation - people born in the first decade of a new century who keenly appreciated the legacy of Victoria's empire but foresaw its imminent decay. (And what a generation it was: Waugh's literary contemporaries included Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene, George Orwell, TH White, Nancy Mitford, Mary Renault, Anthony Powell and WH Auden.) Jarrold fails to capture the excitement of 1920s Oxford, a hotbed of intellectual and artistic exploration, and the screenplay reduces many of the novel's fascinating secondary characters to cameo roles... On the other hand, Jarrold does offer an intriguing take on an enduring literary mystery: the extent to which Charles and Sebastian's 'romantic friendship' is sexual."

"It lacks the visual pyrotechnics of Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice, but Jarrold's movie is otherwise a kindred spirit, stripped of voiceover and other markers of literary bona fides," writes Sam Adams at the AV Club. "It's a movie of its own, not merely an attempt to cram as much of its source as possible within the confines of a theatrical feature."

Roger Ebert finds it "a good, sound example of the British period drama; mid-range Merchant-Ivory, you could say."

"[Ben] Whishaw makes a fantastic Sebastian, sympathetic yet untouchable in his headlong dash into alcoholism, but [Hayley] Atwell has exactly the wrong look for the part [of Julia]," argues Annie Wagner in the Stranger.

"Rather than emphasize Sebastian's larger-than-life campiness, Whishaw plays him as a tragic fading flower," notes Hank Sartin in Time Out New York. "Curiously, the changes heighten the drama, but make the film a more generic costumer about lovely country estates and British class issues."

Michael Ordoña profiles Matthew Goode for the Los Angeles Times.

"Brideshead Revisited is untaxing, pleasant enough to watch. But I'm still waiting to be seriously discomfited by it." Richard Schickel explains in Time.

"[D]o not, when attempting any course of reading aimed at appreciating Waugh's wit, give undue attention to Brideshead RevisitedTroy Patterson in Slate. "There's a comic novel in there, but it is not, as the common expression goes, struggling to get out. It's lodged there quite contentedly... 'Waugh wrote Brideshead with great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and a deep conviction of its excellence,' Martin Amis once remarked. 'Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise.'"

Erica Abeel talks with Jarrold for indieWIRE.

Posted by dwhudson at July 23, 2008 7:26 AM