By contrast, the miniseries put a fresh spin on the era of booze, cigars and promiscuity that Americans associate with F. Scott Fitzgerald. It brought together its own collection of the beautiful and the damned - and made you feel how literally they surveyed the prospect of damnation. Waugh thought he was depicting the "operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters," and John Mortimer's TV script made that clear with its tautly drawn lines of disastrous life-choices and fate.
Jarrold and his screenwriters, Jeremy Brock and the usually able Andrew Davies, take the easy way out. They fashion a tale of two triangles, with Charles at each apex. First, in the throes of a rhapsodic, sexualized friendship with Sebastian, Charles finds himself drawn to Julia. Second, after Charles and Julia reunite and consummate their love, he discovers that he's pitted against a formidable opponent: her Catholic God. If the first triangle leads to some desultory tension, the second is a disaster. Jarrold and company are unable to empathize with Catholic believers such as the Flytes or imagine the subtle workings of their deity. That's one reason the movie develops all the impact of a shaggy-dog (or maybe shaggy-God) story.
