Movies

Brideshead Revisited is an unimpeachable yet ultimately unmoving adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel about social ambition, religious conflict and doomed love.

There's nothing wrong with director Julian Jarrold's film: The cast is fine, the production values solid. Everything is meticulously appointed in the traditional high style of a Merchant-Ivory period piece.

As in Becoming Jane, Jarrold's Jane Austen tale from last year, it's all beautiful — but bland. The whole endeavor just rings a bit hollow compared to the epic 11-episode miniseries from 1981.

Maybe we've changed too, though. The ideas that homosexuality could serve as a source of torment, and that differences in class and faith could create irreparable rifts in a relationship, seem rather archaic now. And so the chief sources of tension in Waugh's novel, which might have been perceived as incendiary when it was published in 1945, have lost much of their punch.

The stoic Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), a British army officer during World War II, reflects upon the romantic entanglements of his youth. He recalls how be became enraptured by the aristocratic Marchmain family and, specifically, with their ancestral home, Brideshead Castle, where he's now returned with his troops.

Charles first meets the decadent dandy Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) while at Oxford and the two quickly fall into a close friendship, despite Charles' middle-class London roots. The pleasingly flamboyant Sebastian, carrying a well-worn teddy bear and sporting a jaunty flower in his lapel, whisks Charles away to idyllic afternoons of champagne and frolicking in the sunshine.

But then Charles meets Sebastian's sophisticated sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell, from Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream), and becomes smitten with her, which sends the already fragile Sebastian into an alcoholic spiral.

It's hard to understand Charles' deep attraction to Julia. Sure she's lovely but, as played by Atwell, she's also a sullen bore. "I can't stand the place," she says in disaffected fashion between puffs on a cigarette while discussing the stately Brideshead.

Goode is in a tough spot in the role of Charles Ryder: He has to serve as our guide, as our eyes and ears in this glittering, foreign world, and yet he's also our anchor, one we're asked to rely upon even as he does some questionable deeds.

Emma Thompson is, unsurprisingly, an intimidating force as the family's rigidly Catholic matriarch, Lady Marchmain. But being an actress of great nuance, Thompson also displays the vulnerability and insecure possessiveness within this complicated character.

Purists will be pleased, though, to see that Castle Howard, the setting for the beloved Granada Television miniseries, again plays the part of Brideshead. The filmmakers said they couldn't find any other place that was quite so oppressive and grand.