Although he aspires to become an artist, middle-class Charles Ryder reads history at the University of Oxford, where he befriends the flamboyant and wealthy Lord Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian's mother, Lady Marchmain, strongly disapproves of Sebastian's lifestyle, especially his heavy drinking. When Sebastian takes Charles home to visit his nanny, Charles is enthralled by the grandeur of the Marchmain family estate, known as Brideshead, and entranced by its residents, including the devout Roman Catholic Lady Marchmain and her other children, Sebastian's elder brother Bridey and his sisters Julia and Cordelia.
When Lord Marchmain invites Sebastian and Julia to visit him and his mistress Cara in Venice, Lady Marchmain encourages Charles to go with them in the hope that he can act as a positive influence on her son. Increasingly interested in Julia, Charles surreptitiously kisses her in a dark alley, unaware that Sebastian can see them from the other side of a canal. Jealous of his attention to his sister, Sebastian sets out to end this friendship, and on their return to Britain, Lady Marchmain makes it clear that Charles cannot marry Julia since he is not Catholic and professes to be an atheist.
Sebastian's mother, concerned about his increasing alcoholism, cancels his allowance. During a visit to Brideshead, Ryder gives Sebastian money, which he uses to buy alcohol. Later that day, at a party given by the family, Charles is shocked when Lady Marchmain announces that the celebration is in honour of Julia's engagement to Canadian businessman Rex Mottram. Sebastian arrives at the party late and improperly dressed. After an embarrassing scene, Sebastian flees the party, and Lady Marchmain privately dresses down Charles because he gave Sebastian money, and tells him that he is no longer welcome at Brideshead. Sebastian flees to Morocco.
Four years elapse. Lady Marchmain has become terminally ill. She asks Charles to find Sebastian and bring him home. Charles travels to Morocco, but Sebastian could not return even if he wanted to, which he clearly does not. He is in the hospital with fluid in one of his lungs, and the doctor warns Charles that Sebastian is too ill to travel.
More time elapses. Julia marries Rex, and Charles marries as well, and becomes successful as an artist.
Charles is reunited with Julia on an ocean liner travelling to Britain from New York. They immediately realise they are still in love and decide to leave their respective spouses and live together. Charles and Julia return to Brideshead, where Charles plans to ask Rex to step aside so he and Julia can be together. Rex first implies he will never let Julia go, and accuses Charles of just wanting the estate. However, he then relents and agrees to release her in exchange for two of Charles's paintings, which are now viewed as a good investment. He also reveals that he converted to Catholicism to get Julia, and he disdains Charles for not having been willing to do the same. Julia overhears all of this, is shocked and angered, feeling like bartered goods. Their arrangements made, Charles and Julia prepare to leave Brideshead.
Just as they are driving out, however, they pass two cars arriving: Lord Marchmain is terminally ill, and has returned with Cara to spend his final days in his home. On his deathbed Lord Marchmain, who hitherto has not wanted Catholicism, regains his faith and dies reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church. Deeply affected by her father's transformation, Julia decides she cannot relinquish her own faith to be with Charles, and the two sadly part.
Several years later, the Second World War is in progress. A disillusioned Charles, now an army captain, finds himself once again at Brideshead, this time in its capacity as a military base. A corporal tells him Julia is serving in the women's services overseas and that her elder brother, Bridey, died during the Blitz. We also learn that he is alone – he has no girlfriend or wife.
Charles visits the family chapel, where he finds a single lit candle. He dips his hand into holy water and moves to snuff out a candle that is almost out of wax. However, he then reconsiders, and leaves the flame to burn.
Just as it did for the earlier television adaptation of Waugh's novel, Castle Howard in North Yorkshire serves as the setting for Brideshead. In The World of Brideshead, a bonus feature on the DVD release of the film, Simon Howard reveals his family was eager to welcome film crews to the estate once again. It had become a major tourist attraction after the television serial aired; they hoped the feature film would renew interest in the property.
Principal photography took place at Castle Howard during the summer of 2007, and many extras were employed from the local population in and around York.
The ending of the film was also altered from that of the novel. In the film, Charles leaves the family chapel at Brideshead seemingly unchanged in his atheist/agnostic leanings, although he decides not to snuff out the candle that is burning. The novel ends with Charles entering the chapel and kneeling down to pray using "ancient and newly learned words", thus implying he has recently converted to Catholicism.
Release
Box office
The film opened on thirty-three screens in the United States on 25 July 2008 and grossed $332,000 on its opening weekend, ranking twenty-first at the box office. It eventually earned $6,432,256 in the US and $7,018,930 elsewhere for a total worldwide box office of $13,451,186.[3]
Critical reception
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 62% based on reviews from 140 critics, with an average rating of 6.20/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Suspenseful and beautifully mounted, Brideshead Revisited does an able job condensing Evelyn Waugh's novel."[5]Metacritic calculated an average score of 64 out of 100 based on 32 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[6]
Comparing the film to the earlier television adaptation, A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it "necessarily shorter and less faithful to Waugh's book, and also, for what it's worth, more cinematic. It is also tedious, confused and banal." He blamed director Jarrold and screenwriters Davies and Brock "for finding so little new or interesting to say... and for systematically stripping Waugh's novel of its telling nuances and provocative ideas." He concluded, "The long experience of English Catholics as a religious minority, the subtle gradations of class in the British university system, the crazy quilt of sexual norms and taboos governing the lives of young adults: all of this is what makes Brideshead Revisited live and breathe as a novel. None of it registers with any force in this lazy, complacent film, which takes the novel's name in vain."[7]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "While elegantly mounted and well acted, the movie is not the equal of the TV production, in part because so much material had to be compressed into such a shorter time. It is also not the equal of the recent film Atonement, which in an oblique way touches on similar issues. But it is a good, sound example of the British period drama; mid-range Merchant-Ivory, you could say."[8]
Mark Olsen of the Los Angeles Times said, "The film's strengths are in Waugh's story and not so much in the particular spin of these filmmakers. Their decision to turn up the volume on the homosexual undertones between Sebastian and Charles feels like an unimaginative nod to our modern times... In Brideshead, Jarrold seems too often to consciously be making an in-quotation-marks classy picture, much like last year's Atonement, in which the costumes and setting are just so, but the human drama gets lost amid the pictorial pleasantries. That the film is neither a true triumph nor a total disaster makes it somewhat difficult to justify revisiting Brideshead, apart from the hope it will inspire someone somewhere to pick up the book."[9]
David Wiegand of the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a very noble movie, which makes it interesting at times, but not often enough... What Jarrold has done right is to hire Andrew Davies to work with Jeremy Brock on the adaptation. There's no one better at dusting off English classics for the wide and small screens than Davies. He and Brock have done a competent job of culling just the right plot elements from Waugh's book and assembling them into a serviceable story. Whether you want to stick it out, however, is another matter entirely... Jarrold and his writers are more than respectful of the original source material, but compressing it all into two hours and change doesn't make for a terribly enjoyable film... Davies and Brock perform miracles in making this somewhat workable, but the ultimate impossibility of their task shows at the end."[10]
David Ansen of Newsweek suggested, "Think of Jarrold's briskly paced, stylish abridgment as a fine introduction to Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy. It brings these unforgettable characters to life again, and if it sends people back to the novel, and back to the classic TV series... all the better. There's room for more than one Brideshead in this far less glamorous day and age."[11]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly graded the film B and commented, "Brideshead Revisited is opulent and watchable, yet except for Thompson's acting, it's missing something – a grander, more ambivalent vision of the England it depicts dying out. In the series, we looked at that palatial fortress of Brideshead manor and thought: Here, in one house, is a fading empire. In the movie, it's just sublime real estate."[12]
Dennis Harvey of Variety called the film "finely wrought" and added, "Purists may blanch at the screenplay's changes to the source material's narrative fine points, but its spirit survives intact... Goode provides a fine center of gravity as the middle-class tourist in heady but toxic upper-class realms. Thompson superbly etches a complex, eventually tragic portrait in her relatively few scenes."[4]
Geoffrey Macnab of The Independent rated the film three out of five stars and called it "flawed and uneven". He added, "In trying to shoehorn Waugh's novel into a two-hour movie, the film-makers have left characters underdeveloped while skipping over plot points and condensing material that surely requires greater exposition. Boldly – and perhaps rashly – they have almost entirely dispensed with voiceover narration. Anyone expecting an equivalent to Jeremy Irons' evocative reading of Waugh's prose will be disappointed... On the credit side, this Brideshead boasts a handful of very strong performances... Emma Thompson makes a formidable Lady Marchmain and Michael Gambon is dependable as ever as Lord Marchmain but this Brideshead is slow to build momentum. At first, it is hard to engage emotionally in a story that leaps around in time and skirts over what should be key events, but the film grows progressively stronger and more moving."[13]
Home media
The film was released on DVD in anamorphic widescreen format, with subtitles in English for the hearing impaired and Spanish, on 13 January 2009. Bonus features include commentary by director Julian Jarrold, producer Kevin Loader, and screenwriter Jeremy Brock, deleted scenes, and The World of Brideshead, featuring interviews with cast and crew members.
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles Ryder, most especially his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion called Brideshead Castle. Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Sebastian and Julia. The novel explores themes including Catholicism and nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy. A faithful and well-received television adaptation of the novel was produced in an 11-part miniseries by Granada Television in 1981.
Andrew Wynford Davies is a Welsh screenwriter and novelist, best known for his television adaptations of To Serve Them All My Days, House of Cards, Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, War & Peace, and his original serial A Very Peculiar Practice. He was made a BAFTA Fellow in 2002.
William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp,, styled Viscount Elmley until 1891, was a British Liberal politician. He was Governor of New South Wales between 1899 and 1901, a member of the Liberal administrations of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H. H. Asquith between 1905 and 1915, and leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords between 1924 and 1931. When political enemies threatened to make his homosexuality public, he resigned from office to go into exile. Lord Beauchamp is often assumed to be the model for the character Lord Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited.
Leander Club, founded in 1818, is one of the oldest rowing clubs in the world, and the oldest non-academic club. It is based in Remenham in Berkshire, England and adjoins Henley-on-Thames. Only three other surviving clubs were founded prior to Leander: Brasenose College Boat Club and Jesus College Boat Club and Westminster School Boat Club, founded in 1813.
Stephen James Napier Tennant was a British socialite known for his decadent, eccentric lifestyle. He was a central member of the socialite group referred to as "Bright Young Things" by the tabloid press of the time.
Anthony Colin Gerald Andrews is an English actor. He played Lord Sebastian Flyte in the ITV miniseries Brideshead Revisited (1981), for which he won Golden Globe and BAFTA television awards, and was nominated for an Emmy. His other lead roles include Operation Daybreak (1975), Danger UXB (1979), Ivanhoe (1982) and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982), and he played UK Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in The King's Speech (2010).
Madresfield Court is a country house in Malvern, Worcestershire, England. The home of the Lygon family for nearly six centuries, it has never been sold and has passed only by inheritance since the 12th century; a line of unbroken family ownership reputedly exceeded in length in England only by homes owned by the British Royal Family. The present building is largely a Victorian reconstruction, although the origins of the present house are from the 16th century, and the site has been occupied since Anglo-Saxon times. The novelist Evelyn Waugh was a frequent visitor to the house and based the family of Marchmain, who are central to his novel Brideshead Revisited, on the Lygons. Surrounded by a moat, the Court is a Grade I listed building.
Aloysius is Lord Sebastian Flyte's teddy bear in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945.
Archibald Ormsby-Gore, better known as Archie, was the teddy-bear of English poet laureate John Betjeman. Together with a toy elephant known as Jumbo, he was a lifelong companion of Betjeman's.
William Lygon, 8th Earl Beauchamp, JP, DL, styled as Viscount Elmley until 1938, was a politician in the United Kingdom. The eldest son of the controversial William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, sometime leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) for East Norfolk before in 1938 inheriting his father's seat in the House of Lords. He remained a member there until his death.
Julian Edward Peter Jarrold is a BAFTA-nominated British film and television director.
Brideshead Revisited is a 1981 British television serial starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. It was produced by Granada Television for broadcast by the ITV network. Significant elements of it were directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who handled the initial phases of the production, before Charles Sturridge carried on with the series. The first episode is credited to both men equally.
Geo. F. Trumper is a British men's barber and perfumer in London, England, which sells its own brand of men's fragrances and personal grooming products. It was established in 1875 by George Francis William Trumper as a Gentlemen's Barber Shop. George Trumper was not only an excellent barber but also a master perfumer, and he soon gained a reputation as such among the gentlemen of London's elite.
Hugh Patrick Lygon was the second son of William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, and, though often believed to be the inspiration for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Waugh told the Lygon family that this was not the case, Lygon was a close friend of the Waugh while at Oxford. A. L. Rowse believed the two to be lovers. They were both members of the Hypocrites' Club, along with their contemporaries Robert Byron, Murray Andrew McLean, and the Plunket Greene brothers, Richard and David, and of which Lygon was also president club, David Plunket Greene was a good friend of Hugh Lygon.
Lady Mary Lygon, known as Maimie, was a British aristocrat and Russian princess by marriage.
Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh is an Irish costume designer. Much of her career has been in Irish and British-Irish productions, such as Michael Collins (1996), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), Brideshead Revisited (2008) and Ondine (2009). She has been nominated six times for Best Costume Design from the Irish Film & Television Academy.
Alastair Hugh Graham was an honorary attaché in Athens and Cairo, an Oxford friend of Evelyn Waugh, and, according to Waugh's letters, one of his "romances". He is, together with Hugh Lygon and Stephen Tennant, considered the main inspiration for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.
Lady Dorothy Lygon was an English socialite, and one of the Bright Young Things. She served as a Flight Officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during WWII, and later became an archivist.
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