Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited

Directed by Julian Jarrold (PG-13)

A middle-class young man falls in with the family of his upper-class chum.

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The makers of this most recent Brideshead Revisited adaptation show little faith in the sophistication of their American audience, said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel was a triumph of understated Britishness: Despite roiling religious undertones, a perverse love triangle, and a dramatic addiction subplot, the book’s characters kept their upper lips stiff. In Julian Jarrold’s version, emotions “keep sloshing around on the surface.” The novel’s protagonist, Sebastian Flyte, was effete but ambiguous. Here Ben Whishaw plays him as a flaming homosexual. Jarrold has replaced Waugh’s shrewd family narrative with a run-of-the-mill romance, said Wesley Morris in The Boston Globe. Why revisit Brideshead if you’re just going to turn it into a cross between The English Patient and Atonement? There’s one legitimate reason to see this film, said Sam Adams in The Onion. That’s Emma Thompson’s uncharacteristically fiery turn as the larger-than-life Lady Marchmain. “Thompson might seem like a strange choice to play the overpowering matriarch, but her performance is among the strongest of her career.”