"Brideshead Revisited"

Brideshead Revisited ***

Brideshead Revisited offers an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel—a searing tale of forbidden love, religious fervor, and ethical conflict. It is a story for all time.
Directed by Julian Jarrold, Brideshead Revisited takes place between the First and Second World Wars. As with Waugh’s novel, the axis of the movie is Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), a handsome and aloof young man who imagines most of the film’s narrative in an elaborate flashback.
The story begins when Charles pursues his studies at Oxford, where he falls under the spell of Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), the popular gay son of an aristocratic English family. As Charles and Sebastian’s friendship takes flight, they enjoy a homoerotic flirtation.
Eventually, Charles accompanies his college chum to Brideshead, the family’s regal estate. Given his comparatively modest London upbringing, Charles is overwhelmed by the family’s wealth and class. For Charles, Brideshead itself is ground zero for his most fervent desires for a life of beauty and privilege.
Later, Charles and Sebastian travel to Venice to visit Sebastian’s father Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) and his mistress Cara (Greta Scacchi). They are joined on their voyage by Sebastian’s sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). Before you can say Saint Mark’s Basilica, Charles and Julia fall hopelessly in love, leaving Sebastian to sate his loneliness and misery in the opium dens of Morocco.
Yet even with the considerable roadblock of Sebastian removed from their lives, Charles and Julia are unable to enjoy an easy pathway towards love and commitment. Their most formidable impediment to happiness doesn’t find its roots in their class or economic differences, but rather, in their religion.
A self-described atheist, Charles’s lack of religious commitment is the crux of the matter for Sebastian and Julia’s mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), the undisputed matriarch of their devout Roman Catholic family. She simply cannot countenance Charles’s fundamental religious differences. And so begins the long and winding story of Brideshead Revisited, a story that becomes increasingly torturous as the two young lovers remain unable, time and time again, to overcome the religious zeal and familial angst that define their would-be life together.
For all of its ethical and religious strife, Jarrold’s adaptation of Waugh’s novel is oddly antiseptic and dispassionate. The movie largely dispenses with the novel’s emotional conflicts, concentrating instead on the aesthetic beauty of its set pieces. The result is an overarching sense of vacancy. Perhaps that was the filmmakers’ intention after all: to demonstrate that, for all of their wealth and privilege, the lofty denizens of ancient, ethereal places like Brideshead are empty beyond belief—no matter what they tell us to the contrary.