Okay, so here’s the trailer for the new film version of Brideshead Revisited which seems to make it all a heated power struggle between Lady Marchmain and Charles Ryder over something – which I suppose, at some level, it is, but really. It’s so histronic about something that simply doesn’t, as it ends up coming to us, seem that interesting.
That’s what happens when you rip the guts out of something.
(I’m not saying the film does – obviously I’ve not seen it. But the trailer certainly gives that impression.)
(BTW – the actor who plays Charles Ryder- is it just me or does his voice sound so very much like Jeremy Irons’?)
Apart from everything else, I’d say that the major flaw of this film, again, just from the trailer, seems to be the casting. Emma Thompson is not grabbing me as Lady Marchmain and everyone else looks very ordinary and rather similar – not an interesting face among them.
A really, really short piece I wrote on Brideshead (540 words – almost as long as this blog post)..for Liguorian years ago.
(PLEASE don’t take the title of this post as indicative of a hankering for the teddy bear. It’s not.)