A behind-the-scenes
look at "Brideshead Revisited" with interviews with Ben
Whishaw, Hayley Atwell, Matthew Goode and other cast and crew
members. It follows the making of the 2008 film adaptation.
Revisiting
‘Brideshead,’ With All the Signs of Its Times (and Beyond)
By GINIA
BELLAFANTEJULY 24, 2008
In certain quarters
the film version of “Brideshead Revisited,” opening Friday, will
bring doubt, dismissal, sourness and myriad other disappointments,
reflexively and with no particular regard for its merits. For
loyalists, the 1981 British television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s
novel of faith and dissipation, first shown here on PBS in 1982,
obviated any need for a revival.
“Brideshead
Revisited” was the sort of epic television event that gave rise to
phrases like “epic television event.” Among its legacies, it
helped establish Jeremy Irons as a star. He plays Charles Ryder, the
novel’s central figure, a man reflecting on his life and country
from the vantage point of middle age, a stand-in for Waugh’s belief
in the loneliness of agnosticism.
“Brideshead”
expanded the book’s 351 pages to 11 episodes and took 47 weeks to
shoot. It is less interpretation than stenography; lengthy passages
of text are recapitulated without alteration. What doesn’t reassert
itself as dialogue takes the form of Ryder’s slow, sibilant,
mournful voice-overs, expressions of his longing and detachment. So
faithful is the production to the spirit and letter of Waugh’s 1945
original that it seems as if its creators feared that any variance or
economy might constitute an assault on the entire enterprise of
literature itself.
Twenty-six years
after its American broadcast, “Brideshead Revisited,” which was
rereleased on DVD in 2006, is both pleasure and punishment,
anachronism and forecast. It starts and finishes with Ryder in the
military toward the end of World War II, an occasion that returns him
to Brideshead, the now barren estate of the Flyte family, where the
ecstasies and misfortunes of his narrative unfold. He encounters the
Flytes first through Sebastian (Anthony Andrews) at Oxford, during
the bon vivant years between the wars, and later through Sebastian’s
married sister, Julia (Diana Quick), his lover until her commitment
to Roman Catholicism sends them each toward solitude.
Devoted to the
university years, the first quarter of “Brideshead” is a tedious
evocation of the freedoms and entitlements of the Bright Young
Things, reveling in their epicurean fetishism. Too many tuxedos, too
many luncheons and plover eggs, too many Champagne flutes and too
much recuperation: it feels like 24 hours of the Fine Living Network.
Long, lingering
shots of Brideshead abound and establish Ryder as a man whose sexual
fluidity is less relevant to our understanding of him than the
constancy of his reverence for the traditions and securities of
wealth. In England, where the series fared only moderately well in
the ratings, cultural critics aligned it with the politics of
Thatcherism. Waugh made Ryder both the narrator of his past and the
recorder of a larger one. An architectural painter, Ryder tells us
explicitly that it is buildings, in all their permanence, that he
holds in highest esteem — higher, presumably, than the mercurial
creatures who reside in them.
“Brideshead”
remains, undisputedly, a milestone in the history of mainstream
depictions of homoerotic life. It enlivened the relationship between
Ryder and Sebastian that the novel merely implies, slavishly
submitting it to the forced naturalism of ’70s cinematic style.
From a distance the camera fixates on the two as they languish in
green fields, smoking and silently gazing at each other as if to say:
“You are the essence of divinity. And I love your cashmere.” The
series only heightens the obviousness of some of Waugh’s
connotation; for instance it shows, early on in scene after scene,
Sebastian clutching a large teddy bear — he calls it Aloysius —
the unambiguous symbol of his resistance to maturity. (In London,
after the series was first broadcast, stuffed animals became stylish
accessories in nightclubs.)
No one ever talks
about “Brideshead Revisited” in the same breath as “The Lost
Weekend,” but it should be counted as one of the great treatises on
alcoholism in the pre-therapeutic age. Sebastian’s submission to
addiction is where the television version begins to find its bones,
tracking with a grim precision the shift from youthful incaution to
the uglier and abiding practice of drinking without contingency.
“I do not mind the
idea of his being drunk,” Sebastian’s mother, Lady Marchmain
(Claire Bloom), remarks in her sublime and mannered naïveté. “It
is the thing all men do when they are young. I’m used to the idea
of it. What hurt last night is that there was nothing happy about
it.”
Without the tools or
language of recovery, Sebastian’s family imagines that cutting his
allowance and hiding the decanters will save him. The stupendous
failure of their methods is brilliantly satirized during a moment at
the dinner table when Sebastian, passing his hand over his wineglass
as the butler makes another round with a bottle, pauses and demands
whiskey instead.
Sebastian’s
romantic inclinations eventually take him to Morocco, where he
supports a lover, a German officer of the Foreign Legion, emotionally
broken and physically crippled. Sebastian’s disease — a term
absent from the era’s vernacular for alcoholism — lands him in an
infirmary, suffering from, of all things, pneumonia resulting from
his worn immunity. The first AIDS film would not come until the
mid-1980s, but the image of Sebastian, pallid, listless and
emaciated, casts “Brideshead” as a chilling predictor of the
epidemic, 1981 being the year that cases of a syndrome later
identified as AIDS were reported in the United States.
It is worth
considering that “Brideshead Revisited” appeared during — to
borrow a phrase of Waugh’s — the “dead years” of television.
Long-form narrative had yet to wield its powerful influence on the
medium. In 1982 American viewers had a choice between the sensuous
exploration of love, fidelity and money that “Brideshead”
provided and “The Facts of Life” (or “One Day at a Time” or
“T. J. Hooker”). Like the budding food revolution, it was a
gateway to new kinds of consumed sophistication — the beginning of
something, and the end.
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