Micitype Pretty Good

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Dotbankey A lot of fun.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

manueltb Even though the music, photography, set design and acting are very good, this movie was a disappointment for me. The plot has been skillfully manipulated. In this version, Julia's character has become a victim of a distorted protestant vision of catholic faith, and Lady Flyte is just a selfish, self-centered and fanatic mother. All the beauty, the hope and the humanity of the original is lost, leaving just tortured and melancholic characters who live a sort of impossible love. Of course there is no references to God's grace, personal conscience, repentance, charity, duty or the importance of the family. At the end, it remains only an obscure pseudo-reflection on guilt, that is supposed to be related with the scriptwriters' deformed idea of what the Roman Catholic religion is.

Catharina_Sweden To begin with, it is impossible to watch this movie without comparing it to the TV-series. The series was such a big and important thing for us who were young in the 1980:s. At school, we girls used to discuss with great heat, which man we liked the most - Charles or Sebastian! :-) So, my first feeling was that this new movie was quite an unnecessary production. The perfect rendering of the novel was already there, and you cannot make anything more than perfect, can you..! But then, when I watched it, I still found it to be really good! But this is only because the producer has copied the series. For instance, the actors are chosen to look as much as the original actors as possible, and even the house is the same! But if you can try and forget about the series - or if you by some unlikely lapse have missed the series - this movie is very good! Beautiful, romantic, sensitive, melancholy, and with a lot of excellent dialogue, poetical language and wonderful music!In fact, I must admit that ONE thing was better in the movie: the choice of actor to play Charles. I always thought that Jeremy Irons looked too worn and haggard - especially in the scenes from the university years, when he was supposed to be a very young man. Matthew Goode is much more handsome and attractive, with a very soulful face which is perfect as a background for all the profound and poetic thoughts that we hear Charles tell us! No one can surpass Anthony Andrews as Sebastian, though - he could have been born to do that role! :-)

n-mo The impression I got as I saw scenes of this movie unfold before my eyes was something akin to the impression I would get if modern men had put on period dress and then removed their pants and underwear and went strolling around beautiful monuments in the Old World. Not exactly a pleasant thought, but then, this is not a particularly pleasant movie to watch. Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited fails as an adaptation of the novel, fails to tell a coherent story and ultimately fails as a veritable work of cinema.Let's begin with the adaptation. Detractors of this movie compare it unfavorably to the 1981 Granada TV serial, which was extremely faithful to the novel. Defenders plead that such a comparison is unfair, that a 2-hour movie should never be judged by the same criteria as an 11-hour epic. My response is that cinematic adaptations of novels are as a rule miserably inferior to TV-serial adaptations in terms of capturing the author's intended character development, themes and plot pacing. Moreover, on a psychological note, one might find it hard not to take the filmmakers' choice of the same Castle Howard for Brideshead as seen in the 1981 serial as evidence that they WANT us to compare this to the original.If that be the case, they should have been more careful what they wished for. Adaptations are tricky, remakes are even trickier, and anything that calls itself "Brideshead Revisited" is holding itself up to a lofty standard, one that is almost certainly beyond the reasonable scope of standard-length cinema.Unlike Waugh, who intended the novel as an exposition of Catholic life and the Christian struggle, Davies and Brock are both sons of Anglican vicars whose attitudes towards Christianity run from ambivalent fascination to outright hostility, and this shows through in numerous alterations to the story. But why does this vision not hold up on its own? Why can we not forget about the title, and accept Jarrold's film as its own product, merely "inspired by" Brideshead Revisited? The problem is that they preserved enough of the plot framework of the original to end on a more positive, Catholic note, and so it becomes impossible to totally forget the original. As a result, final product feels messy and incoherent: there is no plausible hint as to the real reason why religion could have both the negative and the sympathetic fallout seen in the film. This is not ambivalence: this is the authors setting up a mystery with absolutely no clues to solve it. It's the difference between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dame Agatha Christie, the latter of whom cheats in her mystery novels by giving the detective essential information that the reader does not have, so that the mystery is unsolvable. Such anticlimax is symptomatic of storytellers who do not really understand their craft or who are too lazy to bother to learn.But Christie, at least, understood her subject matter enough to turn out fodder that was good enough to make for amusing and engaging stage ambiance. The same cannot be said for Davies and Brock: to the extent that their screenplay preserves the theme of Catholicism, they get the religion wrong, at several points. Not having the time to dwell on Charles's discovery of the meaning of the aristocratic world of the Marchmains, they reduce his deep love affair with that world to a tawdry lust ball - a lust triangle for sex and a quest for material riches. In so doing, they both overplay the snobbery of the upper classes and aristocrats as though the Marchmains belonged to nothing more than a fixed anachronistic caste, and overestimate the banal impliability of the upper-middle and bourgeois milieux. Brideshead, here, might as well be a museum, the Marchmains A-list Hollywood stars and Charles, a senior executive at Enron.Now, let's turn to the cinematic aspects of the film, since after all movies are all about pictures and sound, right? Well, see my first paragraph for an idea. Another reason this film inevitably suffers by comparison to the 1981 serial is that that one left us with distinctive ideas about how earlier generations might have carried themselves. The pace, the mannerisms and facial expressions and the lighting in the 2008 film are all quintessentially modern. There is no subtlety of movement or of imagery, and the now explicitly homosexual relationship between Charles and Sebastian isn't the half of it. The females at Brideshead look like porcelain dolls, at best. Transitions do not exist: clashing moods and images and overlay one another in succession at a rate that makes a sugary breakfast cereal commercial on 1990s Saturday morning TV look like a leisurely stroll in the park. Lines either are murmured so halfheartedly that the actors' own frustration with the script's stupidity show through, or are belted with such melodrama as to make an American soap opera star blush.All-in-all, the film not only lacks merit as an adaptation of Waugh's novel, but it also lacks merit, PERIOD. It is too short, too shallow, too incoherent, too facile, too ambitious and at the same time too lazy. Find 11 hours to kill and watch the TV serial, or just buy the book. Don't be lazy and rushed to get what's in it.

paul2001sw-1 The themes of 'Brideshead Revisted' are not dissimilar to those of 'The Great Gatsby'; and there are later echoes in Alan Holingshurst's 'The Line of Beauty' as well. In all three stories, an outside becomes infatuated with the sublime life of the aristocracy; but eventually learns the painful lesson that he does not belong. I haven't read 'Brideshead', but on the basis of this film version, it's the inferior of the tales. Partly this is because the character of the outsider is never wholly established as such, and seems far too naturally at home in the privileged environment for the sense of not belonging to truly take hold. And partially, it's because what excludes him is not so much the wealth and power of his patrons, but their fanatical Catholicism, a theme that lacks contemporary traction and seems in any case incidental (if only the family had been less religious, everyone could have had a happy ending); whereas in 'Gatsby' and 'The Line of Beauty', the story essentially denies the fantasy of an open elite. I never felt there was much as stake here, save for the happiness of a central character who is in any case blessed with looks, talent and (a certain amount of) money of his own. But I'm still tempted to read the novel and see if there are depths to the story undug here.