Do the great books endure because they're classic, or is the fact they're considered classic the thing that makes them endure? For every time a renowned piece of literature has opened our eyes and hearts to new ways of seeing the world, there's another occasion where we've longed to pick up a massive so-called masterpiece and hurl it across the room in frustration. The surprising fact is that many of the classics are actually great stories, and when you blow the hallowed dust off them they're surprisingly fresh and raw. The film makers behind Brideshead Revisited, this most recent film version of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel, manage to put a new, strong spin on the original novel; you know the title, and may recall the story from the 1981 version that played endlessly on PBS, but we're given reasons for watching beyond mere familiarity and nostalgia early, and well.
Matthew Goode (Match Point, The Lookout) is Charles Ryder, a striving university student who meets Sebastian Flyte (Ben Wishaw), a well-born but poorly-behaved fellow classmate. Charles and Sebastian become fast friends, with Sebastian introducing Charles to his beautiful sister Julia (Haley Atwell) and their stern, God-fearing mother Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) at the family's ancestral home, Brideshead. With their grace and wealth and beautiful mansion, the Flytes have everything Charles doesn't; he learns, all too soon, that their seemingly effortless grace and privilege carry a tremendous price. …
There's a lot of distance — geographical, cultural, historical — between us and Waugh's '30s English aristocrats, so it's a tribute to director Julian Jarrold and his screenwriters that we care as much about Charles and the Flytes as we do. The world Charles and the Flytes live in is very different than ours, but as Charles becomes a friend to Sebastian — and Sebastian longs for more than friendship — and Charles grows ever closer to Julia, we realize that some aspects of human behavior are fairly universal regardless of era or class or country.
Jarrold and his actors also have to compete with the memory of the 1981 adaptation, which starred Jeremy Irons as Charles; a PBS staple for years, that 11-hour version had room to take its time. As screenwriter Jeremy Brock notes in the DVD's excellent commentary track, which he gives alongside Jarrold and producer Kevin Loader, the film makers here had to turn " …a 330-page book into a two-hour movie." And yet this version of Brideshead Revisited never feels rushed or reckless; we get a sense of who the characters are, even as they're forced to question who they are in the face of faith and family. (The DVD's deleted scenes offer further glimpses of the story, and the making-of documentary illustrates just how much work it took to fit the book on film.)
The actors are all superb, but Goode stands out as Charles alongside Thompson's Lady Marchmain. Goode has to play a boy and a man, a bright-eyed romantic and a more wary wounded soul willing to fight for what he loves; as Lady Flyte, Thompson is cold, and stern, in a way she's never really been before. The film looks great; Brideshead is "played" by Castle Howard, just as it was in the 1981 version, and the costuming and décor are all top-notch. Purists will note that many of the more elegant and wonderfully written passages of Waugh's novel — gorgeously-written digressions about love and God — aren't in the film, but as beautifully written as those sections of the novel are, they work far better on the page than they would play on the screen. (Great writing doesn't always translate to the screen; as a fictional studio head says to Gregory Peck's F. Scott Fitzgerald in Beloved Infidel, "We can't film adjectives. …" )
The other cruel irony is that viewers who don't know the source material will look at Brideshead Revisited — with its visions of impossible love, a story where a lower-class boy loves a seeming unattainable upper-class woman and setting in a long-lost England on the brink of war — as following in the footsteps of the Oscar-nominated Atonement, when the reverse is actually true. Brideshead Revisited looks like a standard-issue British costume period piece full of crisp, starched shirts and messy, rumpled feelings, but Goode and Thompson make it much more than that as they circle each other and fight in the name of God and love. Brideshead Revisited whittles a massive classic novel down to a lean, clean, dramatic motion picture, and manages to wring real, living emotion out of a story from the past and a time long gone by.