That's a low blow and an untruth. Brideshead Revisited was on PBS which broadcast it, if memory serves, on Sunday nights while those other show were on different nights. If so inclined, one could watch all those shows though I dare say that the audience make-up for a show like T.J. Hooker and the one for Brideshead were as different as Heather Locklear and Laurence Olivier.Damien wrote:It is worth considering that “Brideshead Revisited” appeared during — to borrow a phrase of Waugh’s — the “dead years” of television. Long-form narrative had yet to wield its powerful influence on the medium. In 1982 American viewers had a choice between the sensuous exploration of love, fidelity and money that “Brideshead” provided and “The Facts of Life” (or “One Day at a Time” or “T. J. Hooker”). Like the budding food revolution, it was a gateway to new kinds of consumed sophistication — the beginning of something, and the end.
Brideshead Revisited reviews
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Big Magilla
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An appraisal of the television version from today's New York Times (God, I loved Jeremy Irons in the series):
REVISITING ‘BRIDESHEAD,’ WITH ALL THE SIGNS OF ITS TIMES (AND BEYOND)
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
July 24, 2008
In certain quarters the film version of “Brideshead Revisited,” opening Friday, will bring doubt, dismissal, sourness and myriad other disappointments, reflexively and with no particular regard for its merits. For loyalists, the 1981 British television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel of faith and dissipation, first shown here on PBS in 1982, obviated any need for a revival.
“Brideshead Revisited” was the sort of epic television event that gave rise to phrases like “epic television event.” Among its legacies, it helped establish Jeremy Irons as a star. He plays Charles Ryder, the novel’s central figure, a man reflecting on his life and country from the vantage point of middle age, a stand-in for Waugh’s belief in the loneliness of agnosticism.
“Brideshead” expanded the book’s 351 pages to 11 episodes and took 47 weeks to shoot. It is less interpretation than stenography; lengthy passages of text are recapitulated without alteration. What doesn’t reassert itself as dialogue takes the form of Ryder’s slow, sibilant, mournful voice-overs, expressions of his longing and detachment. So faithful is the production to the spirit and letter of Waugh’s 1945 original that it seems as if its creators feared that any variance or economy might constitute an assault on the entire enterprise of literature itself.
Twenty-six years after its American broadcast, “Brideshead Revisited,” which was rereleased on DVD in 2006, is both pleasure and punishment, anachronism and forecast. It starts and finishes with Ryder in the military toward the end of World War II, an occasion that returns him to Brideshead, the now barren estate of the Flyte family, where the ecstasies and misfortunes of his narrative unfold. He encounters the Flytes first through Sebastian (Anthony Andrews) at Oxford, during the bon vivant years between the wars, and later through Sebastian’s married sister, Julia (Diana Quick), his lover until her commitment to Roman Catholicism sends them each toward solitude.
Devoted to the university years, the first quarter of “Brideshead” is a tedious evocation of the freedoms and entitlements of the Bright Young Things, reveling in their epicurean fetishism. Too many tuxedos, too many luncheons and plover eggs, too many Champagne flutes and too much recuperation: it feels like 24 hours of the Fine Living Network.
Long, lingering shots of Brideshead abound and establish Ryder as a man whose sexual fluidity is less relevant to our understanding of him than the constancy of his reverence for the traditions and securities of wealth. In England, where the series fared only moderately well in the ratings, cultural critics aligned it with the politics of Thatcherism. Waugh made Ryder both the narrator of his past and the recorder of a larger one. An architectural painter, Ryder tells us explicitly that it is buildings, in all their permanence, that he holds in highest esteem — higher, presumably, than the mercurial creatures who reside in them.
“Brideshead” remains, undisputedly, a milestone in the history of mainstream depictions of homoerotic life. It enlivened the relationship between Ryder and Sebastian that the novel merely implies, slavishly submitting it to the forced naturalism of ’70s cinematic style. From a distance the camera fixates on the two as they languish in green fields, smoking and silently gazing at each other as if to say: “You are the essence of divinity. And I love your cashmere.” The series only heightens the obviousness of some of Waugh’s connotation; for instance it shows, early on in scene after scene, Sebastian clutching a large teddy bear — he calls it Aloysius — the unambiguous symbol of his resistance to maturity. (In London, after the series was first broadcast, stuffed animals became stylish accessories in nightclubs.)
No one ever talks about “Brideshead Revisited” in the same breath as “The Lost Weekend,” but it should be counted as one of the great treatises on alcoholism in the pre-therapeutic age. Sebastian’s submission to addiction is where the television version begins to find its bones, tracking with a grim precision the shift from youthful incaution to the uglier and abiding practice of drinking without contingency.
“I do not mind the idea of his being drunk,” Sebastian’s mother, Lady Marchmain (Claire Bloom), remarks in her sublime and mannered naïveté. “It is the thing all men do when they are young. I’m used to the idea of it. What hurt last night is that there was nothing happy about it.”
Without the tools or language of recovery, Sebastian’s family imagines that cutting his allowance and hiding the decanters will save him. The stupendous failure of their methods is brilliantly satirized during a moment at the dinner table when Sebastian, passing his hand over his wineglass as the butler makes another round with a bottle, pauses and demands whiskey instead.
Sebastian’s romantic inclinations eventually take him to Morocco, where he supports a lover, a German officer of the Foreign Legion, emotionally broken and physically crippled. Sebastian’s disease — a term absent from the era’s vernacular for alcoholism — lands him in an infirmary, suffering from, of all things, pneumonia resulting from his worn immunity. The first AIDS film would not come until the mid-1980s, but the image of Sebastian, pallid, listless and emaciated, casts “Brideshead” as a chilling predictor of the epidemic, 1981 being the year that cases of a syndrome later identified as AIDS were reported in the United States.
It is worth considering that “Brideshead Revisited” appeared during — to borrow a phrase of Waugh’s — the “dead years” of television. Long-form narrative had yet to wield its powerful influence on the medium. In 1982 American viewers had a choice between the sensuous exploration of love, fidelity and money that “Brideshead” provided and “The Facts of Life” (or “One Day at a Time” or “T. J. Hooker”). Like the budding food revolution, it was a gateway to new kinds of consumed sophistication — the beginning of something, and the end.
REVISITING ‘BRIDESHEAD,’ WITH ALL THE SIGNS OF ITS TIMES (AND BEYOND)
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
July 24, 2008
In certain quarters the film version of “Brideshead Revisited,” opening Friday, will bring doubt, dismissal, sourness and myriad other disappointments, reflexively and with no particular regard for its merits. For loyalists, the 1981 British television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel of faith and dissipation, first shown here on PBS in 1982, obviated any need for a revival.
“Brideshead Revisited” was the sort of epic television event that gave rise to phrases like “epic television event.” Among its legacies, it helped establish Jeremy Irons as a star. He plays Charles Ryder, the novel’s central figure, a man reflecting on his life and country from the vantage point of middle age, a stand-in for Waugh’s belief in the loneliness of agnosticism.
“Brideshead” expanded the book’s 351 pages to 11 episodes and took 47 weeks to shoot. It is less interpretation than stenography; lengthy passages of text are recapitulated without alteration. What doesn’t reassert itself as dialogue takes the form of Ryder’s slow, sibilant, mournful voice-overs, expressions of his longing and detachment. So faithful is the production to the spirit and letter of Waugh’s 1945 original that it seems as if its creators feared that any variance or economy might constitute an assault on the entire enterprise of literature itself.
Twenty-six years after its American broadcast, “Brideshead Revisited,” which was rereleased on DVD in 2006, is both pleasure and punishment, anachronism and forecast. It starts and finishes with Ryder in the military toward the end of World War II, an occasion that returns him to Brideshead, the now barren estate of the Flyte family, where the ecstasies and misfortunes of his narrative unfold. He encounters the Flytes first through Sebastian (Anthony Andrews) at Oxford, during the bon vivant years between the wars, and later through Sebastian’s married sister, Julia (Diana Quick), his lover until her commitment to Roman Catholicism sends them each toward solitude.
Devoted to the university years, the first quarter of “Brideshead” is a tedious evocation of the freedoms and entitlements of the Bright Young Things, reveling in their epicurean fetishism. Too many tuxedos, too many luncheons and plover eggs, too many Champagne flutes and too much recuperation: it feels like 24 hours of the Fine Living Network.
Long, lingering shots of Brideshead abound and establish Ryder as a man whose sexual fluidity is less relevant to our understanding of him than the constancy of his reverence for the traditions and securities of wealth. In England, where the series fared only moderately well in the ratings, cultural critics aligned it with the politics of Thatcherism. Waugh made Ryder both the narrator of his past and the recorder of a larger one. An architectural painter, Ryder tells us explicitly that it is buildings, in all their permanence, that he holds in highest esteem — higher, presumably, than the mercurial creatures who reside in them.
“Brideshead” remains, undisputedly, a milestone in the history of mainstream depictions of homoerotic life. It enlivened the relationship between Ryder and Sebastian that the novel merely implies, slavishly submitting it to the forced naturalism of ’70s cinematic style. From a distance the camera fixates on the two as they languish in green fields, smoking and silently gazing at each other as if to say: “You are the essence of divinity. And I love your cashmere.” The series only heightens the obviousness of some of Waugh’s connotation; for instance it shows, early on in scene after scene, Sebastian clutching a large teddy bear — he calls it Aloysius — the unambiguous symbol of his resistance to maturity. (In London, after the series was first broadcast, stuffed animals became stylish accessories in nightclubs.)
No one ever talks about “Brideshead Revisited” in the same breath as “The Lost Weekend,” but it should be counted as one of the great treatises on alcoholism in the pre-therapeutic age. Sebastian’s submission to addiction is where the television version begins to find its bones, tracking with a grim precision the shift from youthful incaution to the uglier and abiding practice of drinking without contingency.
“I do not mind the idea of his being drunk,” Sebastian’s mother, Lady Marchmain (Claire Bloom), remarks in her sublime and mannered naïveté. “It is the thing all men do when they are young. I’m used to the idea of it. What hurt last night is that there was nothing happy about it.”
Without the tools or language of recovery, Sebastian’s family imagines that cutting his allowance and hiding the decanters will save him. The stupendous failure of their methods is brilliantly satirized during a moment at the dinner table when Sebastian, passing his hand over his wineglass as the butler makes another round with a bottle, pauses and demands whiskey instead.
Sebastian’s romantic inclinations eventually take him to Morocco, where he supports a lover, a German officer of the Foreign Legion, emotionally broken and physically crippled. Sebastian’s disease — a term absent from the era’s vernacular for alcoholism — lands him in an infirmary, suffering from, of all things, pneumonia resulting from his worn immunity. The first AIDS film would not come until the mid-1980s, but the image of Sebastian, pallid, listless and emaciated, casts “Brideshead” as a chilling predictor of the epidemic, 1981 being the year that cases of a syndrome later identified as AIDS were reported in the United States.
It is worth considering that “Brideshead Revisited” appeared during — to borrow a phrase of Waugh’s — the “dead years” of television. Long-form narrative had yet to wield its powerful influence on the medium. In 1982 American viewers had a choice between the sensuous exploration of love, fidelity and money that “Brideshead” provided and “The Facts of Life” (or “One Day at a Time” or “T. J. Hooker”). Like the budding food revolution, it was a gateway to new kinds of consumed sophistication — the beginning of something, and the end.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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barrybrooks8
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I agree with Magilla. Anything that gets Emma Thompson awards buzz is fine by me. She should've been on the shortlist for her supporting performance in Stranger Than Fiction in 2006.Big Magilla wrote:Anything that gets Emma Thompson awards buzz is not a waste of time. I would love for her to win another Oscar if only to have her no doubt delightfully witty acceptance speech become one of the highlights of the evening.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Big Magilla
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Anything that gets Emma Thompson awards buzz is not a waste of time. I would love for her to win another Oscar if only to have her no doubt delightfully witty acceptance speech become one of the highlights of the evening.
I winced when I heard they were remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still - a film that is as much a part of its time as any. How could they possibly recapture the feel for such a film today?
I winced when I heard they were remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still - a film that is as much a part of its time as any. How could they possibly recapture the feel for such a film today?
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OscarGuy
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Hollywood's out of ideas...duh. What else would cause them to remake the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Monetary motivations and lack of ideas.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
That was exactly my reaction when I heard about this project. The television mini-series version is absolute perfection. What's the point of remaking something that's flawless?Mister Tee wrote:Even presuming this is good...wouldn't it rate as one of the most unnecessary movies of all time?
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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Mister Tee
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Even presuming this is good...wouldn't it rate as one of the most unnecessary movies of all time?
Brideshead Revisited
(U.K.-U.S.)
By DENNIS HARVEY
A Miramax (in North America)/Buena Vista Intl. (in U.K.) release of a Miramax Films (U.S.)/U.K. Film Council, BBC Films (U.K.) presentation, in association with Hanway Films, 2 Entertain, Screen Yorkshire, of an Ecosse Films (U.K.) production. Produced by Robert Bernstein, Douglas Rae, Kevin Loader. Executive producers, David M. Thompson, Nicole Finnan, Tim Haslam and Hugo Heppell. Co-producer, James Saynor. Directed by Julian Jarrold. Screenplay, Andrew Davies, Jeremy Brock, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh.
Charles Ryder - Matthew Goode
Sebastian Flyte - Ben Whishaw
Julia Flyte - Hayley Atwell
Lady Marchmain - Emma Thompson
Lord Marchmain - Michael Gambon
Cara - Greta Scacchi
Rex Mottram - Jonathan Cake
Edward Ryder - Patrick Malahide
A finely wrought, Merchant-Ivory-style Brit-lit adaptation rather curiously unloaded by Miramax smack amid Stateside summer tentpole season -- just before fall fest season and the unveiling of awards contenders -- "Brideshead Revisited" offers lush and compelling drama drawn from Evelyn Waugh's beloved novel. Purists may blanch at the screenplay's changes to the source material's narrative fine points, but its spirit survives intact. Fond memories of the 1981 BBC miniseries likely will only help prod curious fans into theaters, suggesting respectable B.O. on both sides of the Atlantic.
Scenarists Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock (like director Julian Jarrold, all veteran adapters of literary and historical tales for film and TV) have created a few bold shortcuts that will invariably distress folks who justifiably view the BBC mini as one of the truest page-to-screen transfers ever. But then, it had 11 hours in which to reproduce every nuance. And this version's changes, in the end, serve to communicate the novel's complexities within a viable, theatrical-friendly format without ever appearing to rush or coarsen its general arc. (Still, one wouldn't guess this from the film's trailer, which strains to make it look like a pulse-pounding intrigue in period duds, a la "Vanity Fair" or "The Scarlet Letter.")
Allowing auds sufficient retro-aristo-lifestyle sumptuousness for their dollar, yet exhibiting admirable, intelligent directorial restraint, this "Brideshead" is mainstream arthouse fare par excellence. Tale is framed, as in the novel, by the stationing of Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) as a WWII British Army officer in a lavish country estate-turned-temporary military base -- a location he's visited before under very different circumstances.
Bulk of the narrative is set earlier, in the 1920s, as middle-class Charles commences studies at Oxford and falls into the company of fellow student Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), whose impulsive hedonism and affectionate nature charm him. When Sebastian shows Charles the extraordinary ancestral grounds he grew up in, the latter is further seduced by such sheer magnificence.
But as Sebastian is too well mannered to say outright, Brideshead Castle is, for him, a prison of instilled guilt, to be escaped by any means possible -- which, in his case, turns out to be alcohol. With Sebastian's coolly alluring sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) also in residence, the fun comes to a sharp end with the dreaded arrival of their mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) -- a devout, most bitterly husband-abandoned Catholic.
In the hope that the visitor's solidity might steady her son, Lady Marchmain encourages him to accompany the sibs on a trip to visit their father, Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), and his mistress, Cara (Greta Scacchi), in Venice. This is another idyllic time, though the growing attraction between Charles and Julia deals Sebastian a crushing blow that sends him sliding further into alcoholism.
As the years move onward, Sebastian, Charles and Julia drift far from one another, yet remain bound by conflicted secular yearnings and sacred guilt.
While the film offers the closest thing to a gay love story in mainstream cinema since "Brokeback Mountain," it wouldn't be quite right to call the Charles-Sebastian dynamic homoerotic: True to the novel, what Cara terms a "romantic friendship" is tangible more as true love than as mere sexual attraction, no matter that Sebastian suffers the stigma of feeling both.
Unfolding at a pace that never feels rushed despite the compacted runtime, pic clearly portrays the Flyte offspring as forever crippled by the sense of sin imbued in them by their mother. Yet what plays for some time as a fairly harsh condemnation of oppressive religious morality finally becomes a poignant acknowledgement of faith, encapsulating Charles' new attitude toward it in a beautifully low-key close.
Goode provides a fine center of gravity as the middle-class tourist in heady but toxic upper-class realms. Thompson superbly etches a complex, eventually tragic portrait in her relatively few scenes.
Whishaw and Atwell are fine, but leave perhaps a slightly less distinctive stamp on their roles than the series' Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick, respectively.
Without tipping into excess eye candy, the design contribs are all one could wish for, handsomely captured in Jess Hall's widescreen lensing. Adrian Johnson's graceful score is another notable plus in a package that, in every department, approaches the material with understated respect rather than stylistic flash.
Reportedly, Paul Bettany, Jude Law and Jennifer Connelly were attached until helmer David Yates was poached for last year's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." One can say, in this case, that settling for the B team turned out well.
Brideshead Revisited
(U.K.-U.S.)
By DENNIS HARVEY
A Miramax (in North America)/Buena Vista Intl. (in U.K.) release of a Miramax Films (U.S.)/U.K. Film Council, BBC Films (U.K.) presentation, in association with Hanway Films, 2 Entertain, Screen Yorkshire, of an Ecosse Films (U.K.) production. Produced by Robert Bernstein, Douglas Rae, Kevin Loader. Executive producers, David M. Thompson, Nicole Finnan, Tim Haslam and Hugo Heppell. Co-producer, James Saynor. Directed by Julian Jarrold. Screenplay, Andrew Davies, Jeremy Brock, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh.
Charles Ryder - Matthew Goode
Sebastian Flyte - Ben Whishaw
Julia Flyte - Hayley Atwell
Lady Marchmain - Emma Thompson
Lord Marchmain - Michael Gambon
Cara - Greta Scacchi
Rex Mottram - Jonathan Cake
Edward Ryder - Patrick Malahide
A finely wrought, Merchant-Ivory-style Brit-lit adaptation rather curiously unloaded by Miramax smack amid Stateside summer tentpole season -- just before fall fest season and the unveiling of awards contenders -- "Brideshead Revisited" offers lush and compelling drama drawn from Evelyn Waugh's beloved novel. Purists may blanch at the screenplay's changes to the source material's narrative fine points, but its spirit survives intact. Fond memories of the 1981 BBC miniseries likely will only help prod curious fans into theaters, suggesting respectable B.O. on both sides of the Atlantic.
Scenarists Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock (like director Julian Jarrold, all veteran adapters of literary and historical tales for film and TV) have created a few bold shortcuts that will invariably distress folks who justifiably view the BBC mini as one of the truest page-to-screen transfers ever. But then, it had 11 hours in which to reproduce every nuance. And this version's changes, in the end, serve to communicate the novel's complexities within a viable, theatrical-friendly format without ever appearing to rush or coarsen its general arc. (Still, one wouldn't guess this from the film's trailer, which strains to make it look like a pulse-pounding intrigue in period duds, a la "Vanity Fair" or "The Scarlet Letter.")
Allowing auds sufficient retro-aristo-lifestyle sumptuousness for their dollar, yet exhibiting admirable, intelligent directorial restraint, this "Brideshead" is mainstream arthouse fare par excellence. Tale is framed, as in the novel, by the stationing of Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) as a WWII British Army officer in a lavish country estate-turned-temporary military base -- a location he's visited before under very different circumstances.
Bulk of the narrative is set earlier, in the 1920s, as middle-class Charles commences studies at Oxford and falls into the company of fellow student Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), whose impulsive hedonism and affectionate nature charm him. When Sebastian shows Charles the extraordinary ancestral grounds he grew up in, the latter is further seduced by such sheer magnificence.
But as Sebastian is too well mannered to say outright, Brideshead Castle is, for him, a prison of instilled guilt, to be escaped by any means possible -- which, in his case, turns out to be alcohol. With Sebastian's coolly alluring sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) also in residence, the fun comes to a sharp end with the dreaded arrival of their mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) -- a devout, most bitterly husband-abandoned Catholic.
In the hope that the visitor's solidity might steady her son, Lady Marchmain encourages him to accompany the sibs on a trip to visit their father, Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), and his mistress, Cara (Greta Scacchi), in Venice. This is another idyllic time, though the growing attraction between Charles and Julia deals Sebastian a crushing blow that sends him sliding further into alcoholism.
As the years move onward, Sebastian, Charles and Julia drift far from one another, yet remain bound by conflicted secular yearnings and sacred guilt.
While the film offers the closest thing to a gay love story in mainstream cinema since "Brokeback Mountain," it wouldn't be quite right to call the Charles-Sebastian dynamic homoerotic: True to the novel, what Cara terms a "romantic friendship" is tangible more as true love than as mere sexual attraction, no matter that Sebastian suffers the stigma of feeling both.
Unfolding at a pace that never feels rushed despite the compacted runtime, pic clearly portrays the Flyte offspring as forever crippled by the sense of sin imbued in them by their mother. Yet what plays for some time as a fairly harsh condemnation of oppressive religious morality finally becomes a poignant acknowledgement of faith, encapsulating Charles' new attitude toward it in a beautifully low-key close.
Goode provides a fine center of gravity as the middle-class tourist in heady but toxic upper-class realms. Thompson superbly etches a complex, eventually tragic portrait in her relatively few scenes.
Whishaw and Atwell are fine, but leave perhaps a slightly less distinctive stamp on their roles than the series' Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick, respectively.
Without tipping into excess eye candy, the design contribs are all one could wish for, handsomely captured in Jess Hall's widescreen lensing. Adrian Johnson's graceful score is another notable plus in a package that, in every department, approaches the material with understated respect rather than stylistic flash.
Reportedly, Paul Bettany, Jude Law and Jennifer Connelly were attached until helmer David Yates was poached for last year's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." One can say, in this case, that settling for the B team turned out well.