Teddy Bears optional
May 2, 2008 by Amy
Okay, so here’s the trailer for the new film version of Brideshead Revisited which seems to make it all a heated power struggle between Lady Marchmain and Charles Ryder over something - which I suppose, at some level, it is, but really. It’s so histronic about something that simply doesn’t, as it ends up coming to us, seem that interesting.
That’s what happens when you rip the guts out of something.
(I’m not saying the film does - obviously I’ve not seen it. But the trailer certainly gives that impression.)
(BTW - the actor who plays Charles Ryder- is it just me or does his voice sound so very much like Jeremy Irons’?)
Apart from everything else, I’d say that the major flaw of this film, again, just from the trailer, seems to be the casting. Emma Thompson is not grabbing me as Lady Marchmain and everyone else looks very ordinary and rather similar - not an interesting face among them.
A really, really short piece I wrote on Brideshead (540 words - almost as long as this blog post)..for Liguorian years ago.
(PLEASE don’t take the title of this post as indicative of a hankering for the teddy bear. It’s not.)
It may be just middle aged crabbiness but I don’t know how any film makers could improve on the original series shown on PBS years ago. That cast was truly stellar. How do you improve on Olivier. Plus there didn’t seem to be any attempt to cast a modern sensibility on the production. Anthony Andrews playing Sebastian hauling around his teddy bear Aloysius was an image I remember well from my high school years. In fact I was jealous of the fact that I hadn’t thought up a great idea like that (hauling a teddy bear around) to make me stand out in the crowd. Yeah I was very impressionable and silly back then.
It looks like “great bosh” to me.
Utter bosh.
Even a two hour movie is going to be a sound byte of this novel… which may be one of the problems with this production.
No feature film adaptation of any novel is going to capture the entirety of the book. The test will be if it captures the essence of the novel.
And it is hard to imagine, for example, that someone could top Claire Bloom’s performace as the insufferable Lady Marchmain, but I wouldn’t bet against Emma Thompson.
We probably should hold our fire until the movie actually comes out.
The original PBS series was wonderful. If you like Anthony Andrews in Brideshead you might be interested in “Danger UXB”. He plays a young British Officer during WW II who is on bomb disposal. Well done. I have it on VHS.
“Overheated” was the word that kept occurring to me. The music sounded like something from a Hannibal Lecter movie.
The young leads look like mannequins. Utterly undistinguished in voice and features.
Young can’t judge a movie by a trailer, of course, but the book calls for the stately elegance of a Merchant-Ivory film, which appears to be lacking here.
I think you can judge a film maker’s sensibilities by a trailer; it gives one the sense that we’re in store for a soap opera.
It appears that I would be better of having Netflix send me the BBC version (again!) and staying home with “Sebastian Teddy”* for a rainy day Brideshead Festival. Newer, in this case, does not mean better.
*The name Aloysius escaped me, when my daughter brought me a post-surgical Teddy Bear a few years ago. I kept trying to say “he looks like Sebastian’s teddy,” and my young visitors took that to be his name. I probably tried to tell them about Brideshead (…I’m certainly no Waugh) and there may have then been some chloroform on a rag involved. [They have since watched some of the discs with me..] S.T. stays put on my bedside table.
It seems to me that at the heart of Waugh’s book was Charles Ryder’s relationship with God, in regards to which his relationships with the Marchmains were expressions of his resistance to God, and ultimate reconciliation with God. The richness of Waugh’s insights is that they are powerful insights into the theological as well as the interpersonal. Charles Ryder is being remade in a crucible of both transcendent and immanent realities. One might say that the most interesting character in Waugh’s novel is actually God, whose presence permeates every scene, and yet never speaks a word directly, prefering to use secondary causes to effect Charles conversion. The trailer seems to miss the theological dimension entirely, reducing it to a battle of wills between the characters for entirely immanent and worldly concerns. The film itself might prove itself capable of greater depth. It will either be very good or very bad (Waugh’s prose and ideas leave no middle ground)– and if the theological dimension has been bracketed, I fear it will be terrible beyond belief.
I’ve watched the trailer for a third time, and stand by my earlier reaction.* The trailer is more tolerable with the sound turned way down and, tastes skewed from a matinee of Baby Mama I’m sure, the visual appeal is there. I could hope that this is a superb rendition of Waugh’s work being marketed to appeal to the emo/Oprah generation, but it may well turn out to be a masterpiece of eye candy. I agree with Fr. Steve - it will be at an extreme.
*it’s hard to forget Ben Whishaw …I was waiting for him to start smelling everything.
beastly!
But this teddy bear might work, no?
My wife and I just finished watching, for the third or fourth time, the original British version from 1981, which is simply splendid. You are right about this new one: the trailer seems to suggest the entire film is concerned with “libido dominandi” and little else. I’ve also spotted, even in such a short bit of film, several gross inaccuracies and absurd liberties with Waugh’s original text. I’ll still see it, because I’m obsessed with all things Waugh, but I’m not holding out hope it will be well done. Let us not forget that Waugh himself vetoed an earlier Hollywood attempt to put his novel onto film.
I’ve seen an interview with the scriptwriter of the new adaption (one Andrew Davies, who does quite a line producing sexed-up adaptations of Victorian novels). He said he regards God as the villain of BRIDESHEAD and that the film will present Julia’s failure to go off with Ryder as a tragedy due to weakness and religiously-inspired fear.