Although movie critics like to mock multipart British literary adaptations for being slavishly reverential to their sources, let's just admit that at their best they provide actors with greater opportunities to develop complex characters than any other form of art or entertainment. Even mediocre bookish miniseries can make certain movies seem inadequate or superfluous.
After decades of Masterpiece Theatre, a new adaptation of a classic needs a raison d'etre, whether it's Roman Polanski pouring his first-hand knowledge of threatened youth into Oliver Twist or Joe Wright having the fresh idea to rough up Pride and Prejudice and show just how economically desperate an unmarried woman in Jane Austen's England can be. Who can even remember the big-screen Nicholas Nickleby from 2002? Despite the presence of Christopher Plummer and Juliet Stevenson, it sank into oblivion, unable to compete with Dickens-lovers' memories of the 8 1/2-hour Royal Shakespeare Company's Nickleby that became a smash in London and Broadway and a four-night event on British and American TV.
As far as I can tell, Julian Jarrold, the director of the new Brideshead Revisited, had no creative impetus to adapt Evelyn Waugh's novel apart from making it available to those who lack the patience for the engrossing 11-part 1982 TV version that catapulted Jeremy Irons into stardom and prompted Brideshead parties among the young, literate and fashionable when it played on PBS' Great Performances here. (A set of DVDs is available on the Acorn label.)
Jarrold talked a good game with The New York Times: "It is an archetypal type of story of this young individual from a poorer, less interesting background" - aspiring artist Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) - who is welcomed into this beautiful, magical, alluring kingdom" - the palatial estate of Brideshead - "with wonderful, magical people" - notably, ne'er-do-well and increasingly alcoholic Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) and his staunch Catholic mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson). "And then," says Jarrold, "he begins to realize that everything is not what it seems."
But Jarrold's reduction of the story is so archetypal that it's indistinguishable from soap opera. It would have been daunting for even a master like Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) to adapt the rich and complex novel for a conventional movie running time, but what Jarrold has done is less adaptation than abbreviation. All the substance has been left on the cutting-room floor.
