Why even visit the first time? Brideshead ReSpoiled
“Brideshead” is a beautifully photographed, overlong adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s sumptuous novel. Julian Jarrold directs with an eye for beauty but without the chops for merciless cutting.
Matthew (pretty) Goode is young Charles Ryder, a scrupulous social climber who befriends fellow Oxford student Sebastian Flyte (Ben Wishaw), a filthy-rich ne’er-do-well dipsomaniac with a family of skeletons in his closet, or at the least a skeleton of a family.
Charles is bewitched by Sebastian’s eerie clan, though it’s hard to say with which he falls harder in love, Sebastian’s sister or his house. Brideshead, played by the magnificent Castle Howard in Yorkshire, is capable of striking awe into both Ryder and viewer alike. Its wide halls are filled with sheet-covered busts topped by high, arching ceilings. Its landscapes sweeps along vast English countryside, its renaissance architecture looking both austerely ornate and enchanting.
The sumptuous landscape aside, the film showcases great performances from all the leads, especially Emma Thompson as a cold cathlo-maniac matriarch, instilling in her children the self-hatred required of all Catholics. She manages to be both conniving and relatable, and it’s a pity we don’t get to spend more time with her.
We instead follow Ryder as he is whisked into the world of privilege only to find it’s not all peaches and servants. The gang at Brideshead spends an endless summer which ends as Ryder falls for Sebastian’s sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). He’s left to watch as she’s wed off to a more eligible (read: Catholic) gentleman, and to ward off Sebastian’s subtle advances.
The three scatter and cut off ties after two fleeting kisses, both involving Ryder and one of the two siblings. Sebastian jet-sets to Morocco to drink himself into such a stupor that his mother shows up on Ryder’s doorstep years later, asking him to bring her son home. During the intervening years Ryder has become a famous painter, but when Emma Thompson asks, he heads to Africa after Sebastian, who chooses instead to live out the rest of his jaundiced days in a Moroccan hospital. Without his charge, Ryder returns to England.
He finally beds Julia, even though she’s married, and has at last found, he thinks, his happiness. He barters for Julia with her husband, purchasing her with a set of paintings. Just as the two think they are home free, Julia’s ne’er-do-well, filthy-rich father arrives after living in sin for years with his mistress in Venice. It would be a happy reunion, but he’s returned to Brideshead to die.
The family wages war over his soul, Ryder charging that, as he was not a Catholic in life, he should not have to be one in death. Julia manages, in the end, to give him his final rights, and also to stay, like a good Catholic, with her husband after all.
The film grips too tightly and single-mindedly to its Catholic subtext, when the real story seems to be in the lives ruined by it. The social rules and structures crumble around the three, and they are unsure, after they’ve worked so hard to topple them, whether that was what they wanted.
It’s a masterly turn that would have served the whole film better if it had been more succinct or less sprawling. There is an elegiac quality to the film that doesn’t quite hold steady nor grip us; it chooses instead to stretch, like Brideshead, over long distances, presenting boldly but housing little lasting power.
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