Brideshead Revisited (2008)

The greatest movie ever made..!

Pretty Good

People are voting emotionally.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Not a bad film at all. Unfortunately it doesn't bring anything new to the table. Without really making anything wrong, it sticks to the story line, the cast has no surprises and its decently played it still doesn't make it. It is like a cover of a really great song. If the artist doesn't put its own mark on it it will still be a copy, and as such always fail to be better than the original It is like a pale copy of the original masterpiece. If you want to see brilliance, the original Brideshead of 1981 with Anthony Andrews http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000762/?ref_=tt_cl_t6 and Jeremy Irons http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000460/?ref_=tt_cl_t1 is the one to watch http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083390/

I enjoyed the film which is a pale imitation of a great novel. The film was shot mostly at Castle Howard in Yorkshire - as was the TV series. The main theme of the narrative is the loss of youth and innocence but this film makes homosexuality and the conflict of ancient and modern values its theme. In Waugh's novel there is one homosexual character whose lifestyle is referred to in disparaging terms. The book's narrator, Charles Ryder, is eventually reconciled to God's love in spite of his lover, the beautiful and aristocratic Julia, ending their relationship after the deathbed re-conversion of her father to the Catholic faith. The novel is a monumental work that it would be impossible to reflect honestly in a couple of hours and, unsurprisingly,the film fails. Most annoying is the frequent focus upon subjects that were of little significance in the novel and consequent omission of very significant scenes - such as the privileged Oxford undergraduates' support for the establishment during the 1926 General Strike and the hilarious drink- driving incident ('Viscount's Son Unused to Wine' - Evening Standard). This makes a political point as in the film Charles Ryder is wracked with guilt (the implication being that this is a result of his contact with Catholicism). It would not have been possible to pervert the book's message like this if Waugh, who was a Catholic convert, had been around to prevent it. Competent performances by the cast. Especially the girl who played the young Cordellia, Julia's sister. If you want to truly enjoy Brideshead Revisited, read the novel.

I enjoyed both the book and the 13-hr miniseries. In fact, the latter was one of the best things I have ever seen. I know you can't capture everything in 2 hours that you do in 13 hours but what I did see was a major disappointment. The 13-hr version was almost a verbatim enactment of the book. This version uses the same house (Castle Howard) and a similar plot line but that's it. So many elements are changed and I only remember a couple lines from the book. Everything else is de novo. e.g. bringing Julia to Venice so she and Charles could fall in love. In the other version, they did not fall in love until on the ship. With such a short movie, why did they feel they had to tell the tale in flashbacks like the original? And the original movie had a somewhat upbeat ending - not so with this version. While the actors in this movie were OK, they were NOT Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Clair Bloom, Sir Laurence Olivier, or John Gielgud. With the original, I bonded with all the characters and did not want the series to end: no problem with this one ending. My wife found it equally hard to follow and all of her questions were answered starting with, "In the original series..."

"Sebastian's gone missing. He's in a house in Morocco…" It's not only because of lines like this that I think Brideshead Revisited is one of the worst films I have seen in quite a long time…but it doesn't help. You know a film is in trouble when actors of the calibre of Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon absolutely stink up the screen. Thompson is perfectly (and unintentionally) grotesque as Lady Marchmain. What on earth were the scriptwriters and director thinking? The film is based, allegedly, on the Evelyn Waugh novel of the same name (which was made into a truly wonderful TV series in the early '80s), but takes such liberties with the plot that poor old Evelyn must be spinning in his grave. The element of divine grace which informs the novel is simply absent (albeit replaced, to a minor extent, by an entirely spurious and dramatically inexplicable sense of guilt on the part of Charles Ryder, the main character); and even the Catholicism whose tenets direct, consciously or otherwise, the life trajectories of many of the main characters is largely reduced to parody. What else? Sebastian and Julia Flyte are spectacularly miscast; the actor playing Charles' father (the normally reliable Patrick Malahide) badly misjudges the tone of his character; Brideshead, Sebastian's brother, rather brought to mind Michael Palin portraying a WWI German flying ace; the whole emotional driving force of the novel (Charles' graduation from his early infatuation with Sebastian to his more mature love for Julia) is shot to pieces by the asinine attempt to portray, quite early in the film, a kind of rivalry for Charles' affections between Julia and Sebastian. As someone who loves both the novel and the TV series deeply, I found this movie truly revolting. Shouldn't have been made. Don't see it.