Film Review: 'Brideshead Revisited'

AN UNIMPEACHABLE YET ultimately unmoving adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel about social ambition, religious conflict and doomed love.

There's nothing wrong with director Julian Jarrold's take on "'Brideshead Revisited": The cast is fine, the production values solid. Everything is meticulously appointed in the traditional high style of a Merchant-Ivory period piece. As in "Becoming Jane," Jarrold's Jane Austen tale from last year, it's all beautiful — but bland.

The whole endeavor just rings a bit hollow, especially condensed to two hours, compared to the epic 11-episode miniseries from 1981. Maybe we've changed too, though. The ideas that homosexuality could serve as a source of torment, and that differences in class and faith could create irreparable rifts in a relationship, seem rather archaic now. And so the chief sources of tension in Waugh's novel, which might have been perceived as incendiary when it was published in 1945, have lost much of their punch.

Screenwriters Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock have made a few tweaks to the text (which the Waugh estate approved) but the meat of the story remains intact.

Aspiring painter Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode, in the role that made Jeremy Irons famous) becomes enraptured by the aristocratic Marchmain family and, specifically, with their ancestral home, Brideshead Castle. Charles first meets the decadent dandy Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) while at Oxford and the two quickly fall into a close friendship. Then he becomes smitten by Sebastian's sophisticated sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell). Emma Thompson is, unsurprisingly, an intimidating force as the family's rigidly Catholic matriarch, Lady Marchmain.

» PG-13 for some sexual content. 120 min. Two and a half stars out of four.

Written by Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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