As a young man, Evelyn Waugh was anything but pious: his early years were marked by attempted suicide, affairs with both men and women, a bitter divorce, and heavy drinking. In 1924, at age 20, he even collaborated with some friends at Oxford University to produce an amateur film—The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama—that mocked religion in general and Catholicism in particular, with Waugh as a gay Oxford don trying to seduce the Prince of Wales. (The silent short also featured Elsa Lanchester, in her first film role.)
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Brideshead later became a landmark British miniseries—gorgeously shot, brilliantly acted, and, at 659 minutes, meticulously faithful to its source. It aired in the U.S. in 1982 and was released on DVD a couple years ago. But it’s taken more than 60 years to bring Waugh’s best-known novel to the big screen. Director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots, Becoming Jane) and screenwriters Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland) and Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones’s Diary) have compressed the action and put their own spin on the material, prompting some outrage online among fans of the novel and miniseries. Their 133-minute feature isn’t entirely faithful to the book’s details and expresses more ambivalence about religion than Waugh might have wished, but it captures the theme of moral responsibility in an evenhanded way that should speak to believers and nonbelievers alike.
Soon Charles accompanies Sebastian to Brideshead, the majestic family seat, and meets the rest of his family, including his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell), who so resembles her brother that they could be twins. Sebastian and Julia are rebels—he’s a “sodomite” who listens to jazz records, she bobs her hair and smokes cigarettes—but they’re also committed Catholics, indoctrinated since childhood by their devout, gracious, but domineering mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson). The siblings playfully call themselves “heathens” and “sinners,” but underneath their mischievous patter lie deep wells of familial and religious guilt that Charles—an only child, a lapsed Anglican, and a self-proclaimed atheist—can barely fathom.
On the other hand, Jarrold does offer an intriguing take on an enduring literary mystery: the extent to which Charles and Sebastian’s “romantic friendship” is sexual. Waugh modeled Sebastian on one of his own Oxford boyfriends, but once he converted to Catholicism he came to regard his gay inclinations as temptation to be resisted, and the novel is coy on the subject. Jarrold suggests that Sebastian is in love with Charles, but Charles—sexually ambivalent and emotionally withholding—is unable to return his friend’s passion. In one scene invented by Brock and Davies, the pair get drunk together and Sebastian shyly kisses Charles on the lips; Charles drowsily accepts the kiss but doesn’t reciprocate. The added scene suggests that Sebastian drinks to sublimate his unfulfilled longing for Charles as well as to escape the guilt his mother’s Catholic teachings have instilled in him.
Directed by Julian Jarrold
Written by Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies
With Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Hayley Atwell, Ben Whishaw, Greta Scacchi, Anna Madeley, Felicity Jones, and Joseph Beattie
