Tales of Waugh.(Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited)(Movie review)

I SHOULD note at the outset that despite being a literary-minded Catholic convert, I regard Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited with something less than uncritical affection. I tend to share Waugh's own judgment, handed down in the late 1950s when he made revisions on the book, that it "is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language," and I think some of its themes are better amplified in Graham Greene's novels and Waugh's own Sword of Honour trilogy.

Moreover, I'm one of the few Catholic conservatives who have never seen Granada Television's famous twelve-hour Brideshead miniseries, which made a star out of Jeremy Irons and PBS addicts out of millions of Anglophile Americans. In a sense, then, I represent the ideal audience for the shorter, sudsier adaptation of Waugh's novel now showing: I'm less likely than most Waughophiles to gripe about deviations from the source material, and less inclined as well to compare the thing unfavorably with the better, longer Reagan-era adaptation.

Alas, the new Brideshead Revisited has one damning disadvantage: It was produced by a group of utter fools. Indeed, if the passel of philistines responsible for this botch of a movie didn't exist, Waugh himself would have had to invent them. One can't dismiss outright the possibility that the new Brideshead is some sort of posthumous prank by the master, and that its writers and director, in particular, exist only as Waughian send-ups of a certain modern movieland type, rather than as actual flesh-and-blood nincompoops. Not since Roland Joffe transformed The Scarlet Letter into a bodice-ripping vehicle for Demi Moore's thespian ambitions (and surgically augmented breasts) has an adaptation of a classic novel labored so strenuously to miss the point of its source material.

Imagine Christopher Hitchens being hired to pen the screenplay for The Passion of the Christ, and you have roughly the approach that screenwriters Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock took to Waugh's novel, which the author famously described as an attempt to dramatize "what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace,' that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself." Interviewed a few years ago, when the project was still germinating, Davies was having none of this nonsense: "If God can be said to exist in my version," he told the British press, "he would be the villain." His co-writer, Brock, perhaps wary of alienating a large swathe of the novel's fan base before the film had even screened, attempted to soft-pedal the issue somewhat earlier this year, explaining that God, of course, "is not the villain of our adaptation. The villain is man-made theology." (The Almighty no doubt breathed a sigh of relief at this intelligence.)

So much for Waugh's major theme. Nor did the filmmakers care much for the novel's minor theme, the decline of the British aristocracy and the rise of dreary, unheroic mass man. The director, Julian Jarrold, told the New York Times that he had held long, fretful conversations about Waugh's tendency to be "sometimes profoundly undemocratic," particularly in his portrayal ...