Review

Review Date: 3-August-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Brideshead Revisited (2008)

Brideshead Revisited features the artistic detail, solid acting, and emotional restraint of your typical Oscar candidate from across the pond. But it also achieves a surprising intensity by considering human nature from an unusual point of view. It is the story of a man with no connections to anyone or anything in the universe who learns how powerful such connections are in other people's lives. It is a painful lesson because the ties that most people strive to forge are unstable or misguided, even when they are essential.

The story begins in the 1930s as the hero, Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), sets off for Oxford from the working-class lair of his ridiculously detached father. At school he falls in with Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), a fragile, flamboyant young man who gets away with being gay because he comes from rich and noble stock. Charles and Sebastian form what a foreign observer calls one of "these romantic English friendships," a sincere but ill defined attachment lacking sexual commitment on Charles' part. Although he later admits that he would have done anything to gain entry to the realm of the elite, it is not to be assumed that he leads Sebastian on; rather, his distance from any established creed or way of life allows him to test homosexual waters with someone who offers a dazzling new world in addition to genuine affection.

Once inside his friend's palatial home, Brideshead, Charles earns the admiration of Sebastian's sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) and domineering mother (Emma Thompson). His relationship with the family, which spans several years, is fascinating. For his part, Charles craves the beauty that wealth can attain more than the wealth itself, including not only Julia but the statues in Brideshead's halls and the palazzos he sees while accompanying the family to Venice. To the aristocrats he is an outsider, mostly because his atheism clashes with their Catholicism, yet still the matron asks him to curb her son's excesses while Julia longs to drown in his eyes. It is true that those rare people who do not need to belong to something attract others because this quality looks like strength. His hosts have love but do not know how to share it, and Charles' solicitous unfamiliarity gives them hope.

But only to a point. One by one he lets them down because nothing he can offer trumps their inbred affiliations. Yes, the mother drove her husband and children away with her religion, but each turns to her god for ultimate salvation. And that, in a strange way, unites them as a family, and how can Charles compete with that? When at last he turns to face the battlefields of World War II, he has grown to acknowledge an inescapable loneliness. He wanted to be around the things and people that made him happy, but those people — foolishly, inevitably, and definitively — wanted more. The significance of Charles' failure, and all their failures, really, gives Brideshead Revisited a particular dramatic poignancy.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.