Word: sebastian
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Brideshead Revisited Directed by Julian Jarrold; rated PG-13; out now "Don't be such a tourist," Sebastian Flyte chides his college chum when they arrive at the titular house. But gawking is the appeal of this not-mandatory version of the Evelyn Waugh novel. Much is made of the beauty and danger of faith, stately piles and statelier moms (Emma Thompson is the matriarch). It's nice enough to visit, maybe...
...story is really quite simple: A poor but honorable lad named Charles Ryder (played in the new movie by Matthew Goode) goes up to Oxford where he meets Sebastian Marchmain (Ben Whishaw) when the latter leans in his window and throws up on his floor. Soon enough they're dining on plover's eggs and mooning over one another. Sebastian introduces Charles to his family - in this film living in a statelier home than any Masterpiece Theater ever dreamed of - which includes his sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell), and his sternly religious mother (Emma Thompson, splendidly playing as far from...
...feel a certain empathy with poor Sebastian, but there's a part of me that wants to pull him aside and say, "Pull up your socks, boy." It is not necessarily inevitable that he end his life in a clinic in Morocco, totally decimated by drink. It is not inevitable that his sister abandon her rebellious engagement to Charles and accede to the family's tyrannical belief system. Waugh's whole narrative invites this kind of frustrated response. He wants to say something about the eternal values of the religious beliefs he converted to some 15 years before writing Brideshead...
...This new version of the story, directed by Julian Jarrold and written by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, makes the homoerotic attraction between Charles and Sebastian more overt than it was in either the book or the TV series, but its acting - Thompson excepted - is more well-spoken than emotionally forceful. Indeed, the whole film seems to me more polite, less savage, than it might have been. It's possible to argue that that's true of its source material, as well - Waugh wrote the book in about four months, and that haste shows in its lack of intense tragic...
...currently chic for fancy novelists to slum it in the lower genres, the way Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a peasant and milk cows. Sebastian Faulks just wrote a James Bond novel; Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union was a noir mystery set in an alternate universe. Some writers find the discipline invigorating: look at The Road, Cormac McCarthy's fling with apocalyptic science fiction. Some don't: Martin Amis' Night Train was an undercooked attempt at hard-boiled detective fiction. It turns out that trashy books are as hard to write as good ones...