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'Brideshead Revisited': Excellent class, casting

By Roger Moore The Orlando Sentinel

Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh's biting British novel of class, Catholicism, guilt and betrayal — earns a well-cast, beautifully mounted big-screen adaptation that, while it won't make fans forget the hit PBS miniseries version from the 1980s, at least manages to tell the same drawn-out tale with brisk frankness.

It's about a love triangle involving a socially ambitious young man from the ­professional classes and the brother and sister from wealthy nobility he is drawn to almost as strongly as he is their sumptuous country estate home, Brideshead.

We meet Charles Ryder in the Army, ­assigned to headquarters in a vast estate house he came to know as a much younger man. Ryder (Matthew Goode) first visited Brideshead 10 years before, as a ”friend“ of the young son-of-lord, Sebastian (Ben Whishaw), a charming gay drunk and ­Oxford classmate.

Sebastian is Charles' entry into a world of privilege and rank that he has never known. Soon, the aspiring artist transforms from a shy, sexually unsure naif to an ­insider among the Flytes, where the imperious and very devout Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson, perfect) all but orders Charles to watch over Sebastian, keeping him sober and out of the papers.

But Charles has already set eyes on Julia (Hayley Atwell of TV's ­Mansfield Park). As aloof as she is gorgeous in her jazz-age pageboy haircut and flapper fashions, she is sure to complicate Charles' dalliance with Sebastian.

We follow this complicated threesome from their 1930 meeting to later in the decade, when Charles has become a successful ­painter, all the way to World War II, when Charles recalls loves won and lost, ­confidences betrayed and dreams dashed.

Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews were the original Charles and Sebastian on 1980s TV, and Goode (Match Point) and Whishaw (Layer Cake), at similar stages of their very young careers, are almost as interesting.

But the casting coup here was landing Thompson as the strict Catholic matriarch who protects and suffocates her children, and Michael Gambon as her estranged husband, living in sin (with a woman played by Greta Scacchi) in Venice.

The film takes a stab at Waugh's dated Catholicism versus atheism debate, but it is best at the thing British period pieces always do well: class.

The put-downs from those who were born into nobility are insensitive and cruel but only to those sensitive to the jab. ”I don't remember you from Eaton,“ one Oxford swell sniffs to Charles. ”I take it you're not one of us?“ Julia says, in her first words to him. And Charles is all too willing to buy into this, with a ready answer to ”What family are you from?“ ”No family. No one famous.“

The dashing, rail-thin Goode looks ­positively buff next to the emaciated Whishaw, who gives Sebastian a pathos that was missing from the TV miniseries.

Director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) unobtrusively lets his settings, costumes and handsome cast do their thing here, with players such as Thompson purring over Waugh's words — ”He (Sebastian) needs someone plausible by his side.“

Things drag in the third act, and the subtlety robs the piece of some of the moral certitude that movies demand: clear-cut ­villains, motives explained.

But fans of period pieces should relish this, and fans of the oft-repeated TV series won't mind revisiting Brideshead, in this form, in the least.