How dare they.<\/p>\n
No, I mean really, how DARE they?! Imagine if someone did a new adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> and it ended up savagely racist? That\u2019s what they\u2019ve done here. A profoundly Catholic novel, in this \u201cadaptation\u201d, Brideshead Revisited<\/em> is viciously anti-Catholic. They turned a movie about God and the soul, into a lurid love triangle between a homosexual, his sister and a hapless hunk. It\u2019s lame. It\u2019s bad.<\/p>\n I will have much more to say about why I think this happened, and what the failings of the movie are even setting aside it\u2019s gutting of its source material\u2019s core themes. But I wanted to put this out there fast now, so that faithful fans of the novel like me who might be planning on spending $12.00 a piece to see the movie this weekend, should stay home. The filmmakers here have done a hatchet job on this book and their effort deserves outrage and not any kind of box-office rewards.<\/p>\n I\u2019m going to Mass to pray for them.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/p>\n Okay, I\u2019m back now and want to flesh out my initial warning off of Julian Jarrold\u2019s new adaptation of Brideshead Revisited<\/em><\/p>\n Where to start? Hmmmm\u2026. How about here.<\/p>\n (from the London Telegraph, 7\/19\/2008)<\/p>\n But now a new film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh\u2019s Brideshead Revisited will out Sebastian Flyte as a homosexual and even feature a gay kiss between him and Charles.<\/p>\n In one controversial scene in the new \u00a310 million film, which has its world premiere in New York on Tuesday, a love struck Sebastian attempts to kiss Charles on the mouth before his amorous advances are resisted.<\/p>\n The scene has been welcomed by some gay rights campaigners who have already dubbed the film \u201cthe most overtly\u201d gay Brideshead ever\u2026<\/p>\n Andrew Davies, the Bafta winning dramatist who co-wrote the film\u2019s script said: \u201cI think it will probably upset the purists.<\/p>\n \u201cBut one thing we wanted to make clear was that Sebastian was gay and that Charles although terribly fond of him is heading in another direction sexually.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2026 The film\u2019s director, Julian Jarrold however admitted that things weren\u2019t so clear cut in the book.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere is a level of ambiguity in the relationship between Charles and Sebastian in the book. Sebastian needs and wants Charles but it is veiled\u2026 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cVeiled?\u201d Only if you are an idiot, or willfully imposing an agenda on the text. The nature of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian is quite thoroughly discussed in the book. And Sebastian is repeatedly set off from the group Evelyn Waugh dubs \u201cthe sodomites\u201d who are led by Antony Blanche \u2013 who in the book is THE homosexual in the story AND whose role in the story is to articulate the point-of-view of well, Satan. The key discussion of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian comes through the analysis of the Italian mistress, Kara. She speaks of \u201cthese romantic male friendships that you British have,\u201d which occur in youth and are a precursor for adult love. Her warning about the relationship has to do with the fact that chumming around getting sloshed and being feckless with your buddies is something children do, and that growing up will mean letting the idyllic, wistful summers of childhood go. And she thinks Sebastian is going to struggle to accept adulthood.<\/p>\n AND THIS is what Brideshead Revisited <\/em> is about. The invitation of grace to \u201cgrow-up\u201d and assume responsibility for our lives (which invitation, Dostoevsky refers to in his Brothers Karamazov<\/em> in his words (paraphrase) \u201cThe greatest temptation to human nature is to give over one\u2019s responsibility for one\u2019s own life.\u201d) Sebastian isn\u2019t a drunk because he wants to be gay and the Church has filled him with guilt about it. He is drunk because he doesn\u2019t want to accept the limits and urgency and intensity of adult Christianity.<\/p>\n Good grief!<\/p>\n The ethical question that is here to be discussed is this: In adapting someone else\u2019s work, do you owe any fealty at all to the original author\u2019s intentions? Would it be a problem, for example, to do a Christian Mein Kempf<\/em>, you know, and actually make it a lovely, inspirational piece about the power of the human spirit? Do I, as a writer, have a right to take something that has come out of someone else\u2019s brain and heart, and using it\u2019s name for notoriety and marketing, gut out its heart? <\/p>\n Obviously, it is one thing to violate source material because you are too stupid to understand the heart that you are gutting. This diminishes moral culpability, although it seems to me you could still end up in hell for having the hubris not to step aside when a task is so far above your skills and experience. (I would call this obama-ishness.) It is quite another problem morally, to hate the heart you are about to gut, and then willfully subvert it. <\/p>\n In the case of this new version of Brideshead<\/em> both of the above are coming into play to render the project a mess. The task was above the intelligence, insight and skills of the adapters, AND they hate what the book is really about: \u201cthat Catholic thing.\u201d<\/p>\n I could cite probably twenty examples of the film\u2019s anti-Catholicism. But let me just use one of the most egregious. In the book, the Flyte family basically opposes Julia\u2019s engagement to Rex. In fact, the catchesis of the moral pygmy Rex Motram, who as a purely materialist capitalist is in Julia\u2019s words, \u201chalf a man\u201d, takes up the whole mid-point of the book. The family is seriously worried about Rex\u2019s lack of \u201cspiritual curiosity,\u201d but Lady Marchmain respects her daughter\u2019s freedom too much to interfere in her daughter\u2019s marriage. Then, when it is discovered that Rex had been previously married and divorced, the Flyte family vigorously opposes the marriage and eventually Julia is cut off for leaving her faith to marry a divorced man.<\/p>\n In the movie, when Charles asks Julia why she married Rex she basically says that her mother forced her to do it because Rex was a rich Catholic. <\/p>\n Ya see what I mean?<\/p>\n I have to be frank and say that it is difficult for me to analyze the aesthetic flaws in this new movie. I was so distracted during the screening by the way that every scene in the movie had the settings from the book, but with a twisted heart, that I had to force myself to focus on the movie as movie. After the first fifteen minutes when it was clear that Jarrold and writer Davies were going to tell a completely different story than what was in Waugh\u2019s novel, I started saying to myself, \u201cOkay, ignore what you know from the book and just see what they are doing here.\u201d<\/p>\n But it was nearly a futile enterprise. I really know and am in awe of this book much too much to completely separate myself. So, I did bring a friend of mine who is an astute and highly sought after Hollywood script doctor. She hadn\u2019t read the novel, and I wanted her there to help me just look at the movie for itself. And she said, \u2018I would not ever revisit this Brideshead<\/em>.\u201d <\/p>\n My friend\u2019s main notes had to do with the utter lack of sympathy with which all of the characters in the film were drawn. The audience is supposed to believe that Charles Ryder has fallen in love with the Flytes. (In the book, evil Antony warns Charles to be careful of the Flyte \u201ccharm\u201d \u2013 which for Waugh is a code word for the sacramental sensibility of \u201cmatter is good and delightful\u201d and also \u201cfrank seeing life in the face and naming it truthfully\u201d which is predicable of the Flytes who are Roman Catholics, albeit tortured ones.) In the movie, the Flytes have no charm at all. Sebastian is flamingly effeminate, narcissistic and contradictory. Julia is reduced here to just a babe, and a mean one. Cordelia has only two or three lines in the movie. Bridey is a blinking-eyed, officious idiot. And Lady Marchmain is a one-note, bitter fundamentalist who is intent on destroying her children\u2019s lives by saving their souls, and then wonders in her last days, \u201cWhy do they hate me?\u201d<\/p>\n There is no \u201ccharm\u201d in any of the characters. It\u2019s been stripped right out in the filmmakers\u2019 efforts to unmask the Flytes as victims of the ravaging effects of religious dogmatism and specifically Catholicism. For a Catholic not to be offended by this piece is inscrutable. \u201cDo you not have eyes to see?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not an accident that the movie is hostile to the Church. Here are a few choice quips from the screenwriter, Andrew Davies:<\/p>\n I must confess that as a vicar\u2019s son, I am only too familiar with the sinuous arguments that inflict themselves on adolescent Christians\u2026<\/p>\n On the one hand, you have Charles, the outsider, desperately cramming on the laws and customs of these privileged peacocks, in the vain hope of acceptance. On the other, you have Sebastian and Julia, experts in the intricacies of their own caste systems, choking on their own religious guilt.<\/p>\n It gets so bad that you want to scream at them to run and never look back. <\/p>\n With this in mind, the role of Charles Ryder leapt out at me. Here is a young man on a thoroughly modern journey of self-discovery that embraces tolerance of the spiritual with a more contemporary, individualistic search for meaning in this life.<\/p>\n \u2026Contrary to some reports, God is not the villain of our adaptation. The villain is man-made theology; the emotional and moral contortions forced on to individuals by their adherence to a particular set of codes and practices. Inevitably, as in Waugh\u2019s novel, the film debates the merits and demerits of such belief systems in people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n