2008-08-27 
 

brideshead redux

I'm taking a break from contemplating Dude's toast. Instead I'll tell you about the movie we saw last night. (Four dollars each at the Cameo! Can't beat Economic Recovery Tuesdays!)

Brideshead Revisited

Worth a rental, if only for Emma Thompson's superb performance and the chance to see Castle Howard again. Emma manages to convey more emotion in ten seconds of acting than most other actors get out during a full movie. This is definitely a boon for this version. Overall, the story will seem a bit rushed to anyone familiar with either the mini series or the book. Emma's ability to communicate so much in such a short time is very necessary as they needed to cut out quite a bit in order to get the story down to movie size.

In case you haven't already figured it out, my review is going to be completely colored by my experience with the aforementioned miniseries, so if you haven't watched it already...go do so now. Are you back yet? Helloooo? Oh, that's right, the original runs well over 8 hours. It may take you a few days before you get back here and I have a toast to write so....

Matthew Goode does an good job playing Charles. He seems constantly caught in the headlights of the Marchmain train, yet is able to believably dodge to the side at the appropriate moment and even get in a dent or two himself now and again. I confess, I quickly forgot Jeremy Irons.

Sadly, Ben Whinshaw as Sebastian is a different story in that he never manages to give any real depth to his character. This is most noticeable when the story moves to Morocco, but by then I'd given up on caring very much about what happened to him and was glad the scene ended up being so brief. I'm happy that they didn't dance around the gay issue as much in this version as in the original miniseries, but overall Whinshaw's one note performance left me yearning for Anthony Andrew's original more than any other character in the movie.

The Charles/Julia relationship fares better, thanks mostly to Hayley Atwell who may seemed a bit dazed here and there but overall holds her own. That said, this is one area where the cuts to the storyline become most troublesome as characters' true motives get a bit lost in the shuffle. It may've been the director's intention to show them all in a slightly different light, but it didn't work for me.

To be fair, I'm sure the many cuts also added to my distrust of the Charles/Sebastian storyline. Either one of these two main relationships in Brideshead (Charles/Julia and Charles/Sebastioan) may have fit into a normal movie's running time and given the characters more believable motivation, but the compressed timeline ends up hurting them both. While the ending still rings true, I'm very glad I had the fuller story in the back of my head. It helped to fill in the gaps and overall allowed me to enjoy the experience.

Labels: dose of mikey, random review

* posted by me at 1:44 PM

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