'Brideshead' and Bride's Dad
Welcome to the Niall Buggy Film Festival!
By Andy Klein
Adaptations of Brit novelist Evelyn Waugh have never quite connected with audiences on the big screen. Tony Richardson’s film version of The Loved One (1965) – very much a 1960s time capsule – remains the most enjoyable, but the sensibility of screenwriter Terry Southern overpowered the source material. Stephen Fry’s 2004 Bright Young Things was delightful but never found a substantial audience.
By far the best known Waugh adaptation is the 11-part 1981 TV production of Brideshead Revisited, perhaps the author’s most acclaimed novel. Despite the intimidating shadow of that presentation, director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) and screenwriters Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies have taken a whack at a big-screen version, with Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw stepping into the roles that conferred stardom, and something a little short of stardom, on (respectively) Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews.
Goode plays Charles Ryder – an aspiring artist attending Oxford in the 1920s – who becomes fast friends with aristocratic Sebastian Flyte (Whishaw). At Sebastian’s first appearance, another character dismisses him as a “sodomite,” foreclosing the possibility that we might interpret his gay manner as merely British.
Sebastian is, at a minimum, infatuated – maybe even in love – with Charles. But, even though Charles is our protagonist and occasional narrator, we are never as certain about his feelings toward Sebastian. Middle-class by origin, he is bowled over by Sebastian’s family status and, even more, his family estate, Brideshead. The degree to which their relationship is sexual is also a mystery: At first, the audience is left to wonder, “Are they doing it or not?” A half-hour in, the question is acknowledged, but the answer remains ambiguous.
Sebastian’s overbearing, manipulative mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), is an utterly devout Catholic; her sanctimony is one of several reasons Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) has fled to Venice with his mistress (Greta Scacchi). Unsurprisingly, Lady Marchmain is worried for Sebastian’s soul, so she recruits Charles to keep an eye on him. But Charles falls from her favor as the increasingly tormented Sebastian slips into alcoholism. Worse yet, Charles – an unrepentant atheist – tries to court Sebastian’s sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell).
All of this plays out in the familiar manner of tony British literary adaptations, in the Merchant/Ivory manner. But, by being boiled down to a manageable 2 1/4 hours, the story is uneven. More importantly, the thematic development becomes lopsided. (Actually, this may be true in Waugh’s book, if hazy memory serves.) That is, the Marchmain family’s Catholicism appears for most of the running time to be a plot mechanism rather than the thematic center. But, at the very end, questions of faith and grace are suddenly revealed as the very heart of things.
For some viewers, particularly those to whom such issues seem arcane and maybe downright silly – yes, that would be me – it’s jarring. We’ve been swept along with the story’s romantic conflicts and melodrama, and suddenly it turns out that what it’s really concerned with is a theological argument from the Second Council of Trent or something.
The trappings and iconography of Christianity – most strongly in the form of Catholicism – are among the foundations of Western culture; there are innumerable works derived from them whose impact can be experienced by anyone raised within the dominant culture of America. (Bach’s B minor Mass and the Sistine Chapel are more than just A-OK by me.)
But Catholicism also includes elements that are, for non-Catholics, strictly from Alpha Centauri. I wish I could say Brideshead Revisited drew me into its struggles with faith and grace, but, sadly, I felt suddenly abandoned toward the end, as though Jarrold had inexplicably decided to have his actors switch to speaking Finno-Ugric for the final scenes.
And this brings us to Mamma Mia! – which, to the untrained eye, might seem to have nothing in common with Brideshead Revisited beyond the presence in both of Irish actor Niall Buggy playing a clergyman. (Talk about typecasting: According to the IMDb, Buggy has been a man of the cloth in six of his last 10 movies. I have always noted Buggy’s appearances, not merely because of his talents, but because I’ve been giggling at his name ever since Zardoz. It was then that I first dreamt of getting into a brawl with him, just for the chance to disparage him as the “whoreson Buggy.”)
But once again we have a movie that seems so designed for a certain demographic that it excludes everyone else (by which I mean: me).
However much I am not Catholic, I am twice as much not whatever the target audience is for this painful musical.
Is that sentence even comprehensible? Well, you get the drift. I hope.
Amidst the notes I took at the press screening are such queries as “Why does this film exist?” and “Is this supposed to be grotesque?” and “Is this worse than The Apple?” (For those who have missed it, The Apple is pretty much Musical 9 from Outer Space.)
As virtually the entire western world knows, Mamma Mia! is a film version of a hugely successful Broadway production, in which a thin story is used as an excuse to reprise 20 or so tunes by ABBA – the pop band named after a rhyme scheme. The plot bears some similarity to both the 1968 Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell and this year’s Definitely, Maybe: Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), raised by single mom Donna (Meryl Streep) on a Greek island and about to get married, has invited three of Mom’s ex-boyfriends (Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård, Colin Firth), in hopes of determining which is her father.
I’ve got nothing against ABBA. Somewhere in my closet is an original 45 of “Waterloo.” But the execution here doesn’t do justice to even ABBA’s bright, shallow work.
This is, I believe, considered a “musical comedy.” Yet the first thing one notices is how flat the comedy is. Playwright/screenwriter Catherine Johnson gets points for avoiding all the creaky gags that usually show up in these contrived stories. Unfortunately, she has not replaced them with fresh gags. You can count the genuine laughs here on one hand.
And, while the tunes themselves may be tried and true, musicals traditionally rely rather heavily on things like singing and dancing; but what stage director Phyllida Lloyd throws onto the screen could better be described as “singing” and “dancing.” Outside of Christine Baranski’s big production number, Lloyd’s notion of dancing never gets past the “running and jumping up and down” style of ’60s/’70s “rock musicals” like Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar – choreography for non-dancers.
As for the singing, I didn’t expect much from Brosnan, but it’s painful to watch him, because he’s straining and he knows it. Streep, who brought a fine singing voice to Postcards from the Edge and A Prairie Home Companion, is good most of the time, but in some numbers even she is at a loss.
The filmmakers seem to think they can get by on sheer high spirits, but even the highest spirits can’t compensate for Mamma Mia!’s deficiencies.
Brideshead Revisited. Directed by Julian Jarrold. Screenplay by Jeremy Brock & Andrew Davies; based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. With Matthew Goode, Hayley Atwell, Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, and Niall Buggy. Opens Friday at Pacific’s The Grove, Landmark West Los Angeles, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, and Pacific’s Arclight
Sherman Oaks.
Mamma Mia! Directed by Phyllida Lloyd. Written by Catherine Johnson. Music by Stig Anderson, Benny Andersson, and Björn
Ulvaeus. With Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård, Colin Firth, Julie Walters, Christine Baranski, and Niall Buggy. Citywide.
Published: 07/23/2008
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