cause I don’t think that she was. and that is just ONE of the many reasons that i wholeheartedly oppose the new production of ‘brideshead revisited’.
as a four year old, i was not allowed to watch an awful lot of television. But i WAS allowed to watch ‘masterpiece theatre’. i was probably one of the few kids who understood why it was so funny, on ‘sesame street’, that the host of ‘monsterpiece theatre’ was named alistair cookie. ‘brideshead’ was wonderful. And not only for the fact that it secured me a good ten hours of tv time (i don’t say the full thirteen because there were definitely a few episodes during which i did have to stay in the other room.) oh, how i loved Sebastian and his teddy bear, and weren’t he and charles such good friends? charming. sunbathing nude. SUCH good friends, really. i grew up lutheran, i had no idea what was going on.
everything about the entire miniseries is just as it should be. the soundtrack is sublime, the casting, the locations, everything staying true not just to the details but the spirit and style of waugh’s heavenly book. it doesn’t matter if i’m reading that first chapter or hearing jeremy irons when he realizes where he is, just give me ‘it was if someone had switched off the wireless…’ and i’m all a-shiver.
which brings us to the preview i saw the other night. it’s a good thing that ‘tell no one’ was as good as it was or i would have stewed in my seat all evening.
now, i love emma thompson. however. claire bloom she is not. And if the preview is any indication, she’s in the film far more than lady marchmain has any right to be. the one clip with lord marchmain, no lawrence olivier himself, gave the distinct impressions, along with a few other shots, that the filmmakers are trying to put forth the idea that there’s a bit of incest going on.
charles is portrayed as something of a deviant with little more than sex and social climbing on the mind. And poor sebastian is played by the actor who portrayed the murderer in the film ‘perfume’, which was also something of a miserable adaptation. it looks like charles and julia are going at it from the start, and sebastian seems like nothing so much as an afterthought, the kooky brother who’s upset when his sexy sister takes the boy that, honestly, he doesn’t appear all that interested in. i saw neither hide nor hair of aloysius, and he seems nothing so much as completely devoid of character. there’s a far too dramatic scene of sebastian yelling about charles wanting julia, when, in the book and the original production, by the time that charles and julia actually embark on a poorly executed affair, sebastian has for some time already been off in morocco with kurt the lisper, off his head on who knows what. i’ll wager they’re even taken out the delightful vomiting scene! and come to think of it, where have bridey and cordelia gone? moreover, if they’ve reduced anthony blanche’s part by so much as a stutter, they’ve done him a terrible disservice. my mother still shrieks when i do my anthony impression (‘she’s a b-bloodsucker, my dear, an absolute b-b-bloodsucker.’)
in the end though, it all just looks far too slick and exciting. there’s none of the subtlety which it actually requires. and anyway, if the original film has john gielgud in it, do you honestly think it can be improved? (we’re not counting ‘caligula’….)
don’t even get me started on the new ‘a room with a view’.
