Brideshead Revisited

2008
Director: Julian Jarrold
Writers: Jeremy Brock, Andrew Davies

I try really hard to make sure that when I watch a film remake or even adaptation I don’t let my views of the original impact how I see the film. Yet I inevitably find that’s pretty much impossible to do- there’s very rarely been a film I’ve considered better than the book it’s based upon. And this problem has been exemplified for me by finally watching the 2008 big-screen version of Brideshead Revisited. Comparisons with the seminal 1981 TV serial are inescapable in pretty much all reviews I’ve read about it. Having both read the Evelyn Waugh novel and watched the serial, really liking it to the point that I chose to write an essay about it for my TV module, using these as comparison points was going to be inevitable.

Unfortunately, this meant that the 2008 version did not fare as well in my eyes. The serial is just so iconic and beautifully put together that any picture I conjure in my mind of Brideshead is of that show. Watching this film then just felt a bit… off. For me, Jeremy Irons is Charles Ryder and Anthony Andrews is Sebastian Flyte. Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw both do perfectly great jobs in their respective roles; in fact all the performances are excellent. It’s just they couldn’t compete with the original conceptions for me. Even the teddy bear they got for Aloysius felt wrong! It’s sad that so many people’s perception of this film are so much under the influence of the TV serial, but that was just so with-it, perfectly capturing the very mood and feel of the novel.

This tries hard to recreate the sense of melancholy and nostalgia for youthful joys but just can’t match what has been done before. But even without that mighty expectation of matching the serial, this film just can’t truly convey the essence in the same way. Everything is seemingly held at arm’s length and in the end it just ends up at times becoming just a little bit, well, dull. There was no great change in me when seeing the transition from the playful days of Charles and Sebastian’s time together to Charles’s eventual marriage and later life, the mood just didn’t shift like it should. The framing device of Charles’s wartime visit to Brideshead is relatively absent from the film, making the rush of emotions he feels about the place feel less marked and definite. This makes me realise just how much insight Charles’s near omnipresent voiceover in the serial actually granted into the characters and the overall feelings of the time.

Of course the film has slightly different intentions and interests to the serial. Whilst that was more focused on Charles’s nostalgia for the past and about the decline of the aristocracy, the film prefers to explore the more modern sensibilities of the complexities of relationships, religion and sexuality. A lot of time is spent on the subtleties of Charles and Sebastian’s relationship; Sebastian is more definitely presented as homosexual in this but Charles instead is shown less questionably as heterosexual. The film skirts around the nature of their relationship which is implied in the novel as being romantic and possibly sexual; instead it is shown more as a close friendship, with Sebastian presented as infatuated with Charles but he instead seemingly interested in sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) from the start, glossing over the idea the novel proposes that Charles’s attraction to her might be mostly dictated by her similarity to Sebastian and her links with Brideshead, both of which mean so much to him.

This is a shame, for whilst this change does give a nice explanation for the sudden worsening of Sebastian’s alcoholism part-way through, it leaves him as being a more one-dimensional character, defined only by his alcohol addiction and his infatuation for Charles. Charles’s feelings for Sebastian are a lot less ambiguous; however there is refreshingly greater focus on his flaws, namely what he calls his “hunger” for affection and the sense of home and family that Brideshed offers, and the damage that he causes and it causes for him. The sexual tension between him and Julia is nicely foregrounded, and the tension this causes for her with her Catholic upbringing is one of the things this film handles best. Emma Thompson is excellent as usual as the icy matriarch Lady Marchmain, giving us a intersting look into how her religious domineering affects her children. We really see just how dysfunctional this family actually is, I felt more so than the serial.

But comparisons with the serial aside, Brideshead as a film just doesn’t work so well. The serial took 13 hours to adapt the book, examining in really close detail and taking a near-glacial pace which actually helps express the tone. This has only 2 hours, meaning sometimes it feels rushed. Yet despite this at other times it felt quite slow, as in not much was actually happening. It all looks beautiful, the production design is excellent; but that’s just what it comes down to: surface.

Sure, the interest on setting and costume is a feature of most period dramas, but here the characters and emotions never seem to break through enough to have much of an impact. We don’t get an entire sense of just how special Brideshead is to Charles, this being a motivation for much of the plot. The painting he does in the estate, his literal imprint in Brideshead, is never shown. The film by the end feels more like a conventional period romance, characterised by its love triangle, and not an especially exemplary one at that. The novel’s “gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past”, the very features that have defined it, are lost in this.

The Modern Handbook for Girls

This blog really is ending up being a part-time side project for me, and I’ll try not to neglect it so much in the future. I’m just feeling a bit more inspired right now with my realisation that one aspect I’ve pretty much ignored this whole time is television. I don’t know why; I watch a lot of TV, and much of it is just as good if not better than a lot of film I've watched.

Okay so most of my viewing consists of American shows, and primarily HBO shows for that matter, which I’m a complete sucker for. Studying television at uni this year has awakened me to the fact that I’m essentially the perfect ‘quality’ TV viewer: white, from a middle-class background and educated- with a greater awareness of wider cultural practices. I'm a slave to HBO’s reputation and marketing strategies to the point now that I’ll watch near enough anything that’s made by the network, regardless of content. And to be honest I don’t really care that this happens- so many HBO shows I’ve seen have just been so bloody good and totally worth the necessary added engagement and concentration these shows require and which I actually relish.

My latest foray into the HBO canon has been Girls, Lena Dunham’s trendy and critically-divisive personal project about four twentysomething women living in New York and their various friendships, love lives and work struggles. The world they live in is undeniably privileged, despite their long-running monetary woes, but general lives are far more relatable and truthful than that of obvious comparison piece Sex and the City.

This is what attracts me to this show the most: it’s honesty and realism. It’s refreshing to see something where the characters are openly depicted as flawed and at times even blatantly unlikable- from Hannah’s (Lena Dunham) constant erring between self-depreciation and obnoxious self-satisfaction, Marnie’s (Allison Williams) boredom with loving boyfriend Charlie, Jessa’s (Jemima Kirke) recklessness and promiscuity and Shoshanna’s (Zosia Mamet) crippling naïveté. It was this quality which maintained my love of perhaps my all-time favourite show Six Feet Under, which had some of the most layered and well-drawn characters I’ve seen in anything. Their relationships are anything but rosy, with Hannah’s on-off boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver) proving a complex and debatable figure in terms of the extent to which their relationship is indeed loving or exploitative on either of their parts. Friendships too are facile, open to falling apart over the most mundane and petty of things.

This honesty extends too to facets of their everyday lives: the small niggles of first-world problems and the woes of being young, from having parents refuse to pay for your maintenance, to having an overbearing pervy boss, to accidentally smoking crack. On top of that is the unflinching depiction of the girls’ sexuality and I guess ‘female’ problems(?) which at first was almost a source of exoticism for me as a male viewer but then became a frank depiction of human existence which I value in anything I watch. The sex scenes are refreshingly imperfect, from the awkward experiments with anal sex, messy fumblings with condoms and possible STDs. We see their everyday lives, from them simply getting dressed in their bedrooms to having serious discussions in the bathroom.

Some of the criticism levelled at the show is that it depicts a closeted world with only white middle-class characters. I hardly think this was a deliberate intention on Dunham’s part; instead, this being a reflection of her own life, it presents a fairly accurate picture of New York which unfortunately like most of America and the rest of the world, remains segregated, exclusive to only some. It’s unsurprising that young women in their twenties would want to hang out with other young women in their twenties.  Girls is a highly subjective view of New York and the people in it (note the near absence of skyline views of the city)- instead this could prompt questions about the position of modern women. I’m not an expert, but the show could be seen to align with postfeminist notions of individual agency and a detatched awareness of self-identity, especially with Hannah. Here women can be accepting of consumer culture and single lifestyles. However, Girls is questionably a product of pre-second wave feminist notions, such as their continuous desires for heterosexual romance and frequent reference to how their appearance is perceived to others.

So if Girls does have a target audience, does it necessarily have to be female? Hardly, at least I prove it doesn’t have to be- I really enjoyed it, devouring the first series in two days. Producer Judd Apatow said the show was intended to allow men an insight into the world of realistic women. Perhaps I’m more accustomed to the show due to my being in my (very) early twenties, making the features of the characters more relatable for me than a middle-aged viewer. The show comes across as pretty hipsterish with its distinctive apartments and costumes, as well as an indie soundtrack which actually happens to feature a lot of bands I listen to. Honestly, I’m still not totally sure what a hipster is, I don’t know whether I’d be seen as a hipster. To me ‘hipster’ seems to have become a term for any sort of postmodern counter-culture typically associated with young people, a term now linked disdainfully with smugness and irony. Perhaps this association has been the cause of some the criticism levelled at Girls?

Either way, I’m putting off watching the second series until my exams are done and I can’t wait to watch series two. The show makes a satisfying change to my usual programmes, one which is insightful, well-written and surprisingly funny. You don’t have to be a girl to watch Girls, in much the same way you don’t have to be a CIA agent to watch Homeland. Relatable and engaging characters are what make a good show, and this has plenty. The title ‘Girls’, rather than, say, ‘Women’ implies the leads are still in a state of development. Indeed they all still have a lot of growing up to do, and I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes ahead for them.