'Brideshead' reinterpreted
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- July
- 29
What’s up with writer Andrew Davies, TV’s Mr. Adaptation? His many triumphs include the definitive “Pride and Prejudice” (A&E) and a riveting “Bleak House” (PBS) that remains one of the most moving productions I’ve seen on the tube.
Recently, however, the runner has stumbled. Earlier this year, he recast PBS’ “A Room With A View” as a tragic romance — which added a certain poignant urgency, if nothing else, to E.M. Forster’s tale of a young woman who must choose between true love and a safe life. With the misconceived new version of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” however, he’s totally missed the point.
It’s not that a dramatist must be strictly faithful to history or literature. Not everything that fascinates in real life or in a novel works on the screen — particularly the big screen, where time constraints are greater than they are on episodic TV. (One of the reasons that the 1981 miniseries of “Brideshead” remains so magical is that the makers had the time to let a complex narrative unfold.)
Regardless of whether the adapter has two hours or 10, though, he must be loyal to what is psychologically true in someone else’s story. So while Davies’ “Room” had an uncharacteristically unhappy ending, he didn’t mess with the heroine’s — or Forster’s — choices.
Whereas Davies and co-writer Jeremy Brock have totally reimagined “Brideshead” as the doomed romance between Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), an ambitious middle-class Oxford student in ‘20 England, and Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell), the jewel in an aristocratic Catholic family. Let’s forget that it takes Julia — an icy beauty very much like Estella in Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” — a long time to warm to the virtues of our hero in the book. “Brideshead” isn’t really about Charles’ love for Julia. Nor is it about his intense friendship with Julia’s gay, alcoholic brother, Sebastian (Ben Whishaw, at left below with Goode, courtesy of Miramax) — a relationship that foreshadows the Julia romance.
“Brideshead” is about Charles’ love affair with God. It’s about faith achieved through the memory of love. Or as Waugh once described the story, “Brideshead” is about the “operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.”
A convert to Roman Catholicism, Waugh pulls no punches about the price of that grace. The Flytes — who live an Arcadian but otherworldly existence on the estate of the title — are a deeply flawed bunch who chafe under the commitment that Catholicism requires, particularly as practiced by the controlled and controlling matriarch of the clan, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson in a beefed-up role).
But the family also draws strength from that faith. And it is that strength that remains when Charles — haunted by loneliness, loss and the specter of World War II — revisits Brideshead years later.
There’s none of Waugh’s amazing, complicated grace in the film, though — only a stereotyped view of religion as straitjacket.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 4:57 pm by Georgette Gouveia.
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