Jul 25, 2008  |  By: GREG MARZULLO  | COMMENTS     

Looming over manicured lawns and gardens stands a grand mansion, welcoming the curious with an equal measure of nostalgia and foreboding — Brideshead. From the first shots of the fabled home in the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Brideshead Revisited,” it’s clear the house, like the clan inhabiting it, is a siren of sorts — luring people to their doom with some of the most beautiful music ever heard.

Director Julian Jarrold keeps this juxtaposition of stifling gorgeousness at the forefront of his refreshingly strong period piece. While there is plenty of fur trim, elaborate hats, tiaras and Rococo ornamentation, opulence never threatens to overwhelm the oppressive story of the Flyte family and Charles Ryder, an interloper in an overwrought and guilt-ridden world.

Just starting his term at Oxford, Charles (Matthew Goode) comes from a middle-class family and quickly falls in with the wrong, but glamorous, crowd at school, helmed by the delightfully sissified Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw). Soon, the two young men are spending all their time together in what is clearly a romantic relationship — made much more obvious in this film adaptation than in the famous 1981 mini series or the book. The pair even shares a sweet kiss over endless bottles of wine while spending their days at the family manse.

However, nothing lasts forever and soon mummy returns to the homestead. Played by Emma Thompson, Lady Marchmain is a fundamentalist Catholic, whose every question is a trap. “What form do your pleasures take?” she asks Charles, lobbing an attack at the shame-faced Sebastian.

The plot thickens when the boys and Sebastian’s sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell), visit the family patriarch (Michael Gambon), who lives with his mistress in Rome. Once amongst the lush and lusty pleasures of Italy, Charles succumbs to Julia’s charms, effectively ending his affair with Sebastian and helping the young Flyte down the road to alcoholism which plagues him far into Morocco and a monastery’s sick ward.

Charles ends up carrying on his relationship with Julia (even after both are married to other people), but in the end, Catholicism wins the day, God triumphs over the sinner and war overruns the continent.

WHILE THE script, written by Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies, takes ample liberties with the book, the changes propel the story forward for the movie audience and the age of instant entertainment. That’s not to say the film, clocking in at two hours, gives short shrift to mood and character.

Quite the contrary, each set piece seems chosen to enhance the story’s line (is that Icarus painted on the ceiling of Brideshead’s entry hall?), and from Thompson’s icy yet brittle exterior to the painfully wistful performance of Whishaw, each performance is roundly developed.

With such a strong foundation, the film can actually delve into the thematic elements of Waugh’s original story, including the blasting of religion’s stranglehold on people’s choices and futures. Thompson, as the family matriarch, embodies the worst impulses of the religious establishment, but she also projects the woman’s bewildered fragility with a faltering step and sloping lip when she says of her children, “All I ever wanted was to see them safe, and all they do is hate me.”

For those of us who eschew traditional Christianity’s tentacles, watching Sebastian sublimate his desires and then punish himself with drink and monasticism (literal and otherwise) is a painfully familiar journey. No matter that the time period is set before World War II — religious intolerance for people with unorthodox sexual and romantic desires looks frighteningly familiar across the ages.