The Duke: Larceny with a twist

The Duke (2020) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and brief sexuality

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.29.22

This is another great one for the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction file.

 

On the very early morning of August 21, 1961, somebody broke into London’s National Gallery and stole Francisco Goya’s painting, “Portrait of the Duke of Wellington.” The carefully calculated crime baffled police, who assumed that the caper must have been masterminded by a professional gang of experienced Italian art thieves.

 

Kempton (Jim Broadbent) promises, after one final attempt, that he'll stop fighting the
BBC over its television license fees. Alas, his wife Dorothy (Helen Mirren) isn't
sure that she believes him...

Four years later, the painting was returned by 61-year-old Kempton Bunton, a disabled pensioner who subsequently confessed to the crime.

That was wild enough … but what happened at Bunton’s subsequent trial was so audacious, that it prompted an amendment of British law.

 

Director Roger Michell’s delightful depiction of these astonishing events, a cheeky slice of gentle British whimsy, is fueled by endearing performances from Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, as Kempton and his wife, Dorothy. Michell, cinematographer Mike Eley and editor Kristina Hetherington deliberately emphasize a retro look, atmosphere and pacing, strongly evoking a sense that their film could have been made during the 1960s.

 

Screenwriters Richard Bean and Clive Coleman compress the time frame, but otherwise present the saga pretty much as it actually went down; they were blessed, during production, with hitherto unrevealed details supplied by Bunton’s grandson.

 

Kempton is introduced as a taxi driver and frustrated playwright — his latest opus is a reimagining of the scriptures with Jesus as a woman (!) — who has long been annoyed by the BBC’s television license fee. His sad efforts to stoke public awareness with a home-grown campaign — “Free TV for the OAP (Old Age Pensioners)” — has gone nowhere; he also has been imprisoned several times, for non-payment of the license fee.

 

(Tossed into Durham Prison for two weeks, for refusing to pay a television fee? Seriously?)

 

Not much later, a wealthy American art collector purchases Goya’s painting for £140,000, with the intention of taking it to the United States. Scandalized by the thought of losing this precious artwork, the British government buys it back for the same sum. Kempton becomes outraged, while watching the resulting press conference on (his illegal) TV, grousing the such a sum could have provided free television to thousands of OAPs.

 

Kempton obsesses over the painting — much to Dorothy’s long-suffering dismay — visits it often, and views it as a tangible example of everything wrong with government spending. He learns that the gallery’s sophisticated alarm system is deactivated during early mornings, so the cleaning crew can work; access can be made via a window in an upstairs bathroom.

 

And — hey, presto! — the painting winds up in the Bunton’s Newcastle flat. He and younger son Jackie (Fionn Whitehead) cleverly conceal it by constructing a false back to a bedroom wardrobe.

 

But now what?

The King's Man: A royal good time!

The King's Man (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong, bloody violence, profanity and sexual candor

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.24.21

Fans of this series are apt to be mighty surprised — happily, one hopes — by this third entry’s unexpected shift in tone and style.

 

En route to Russia in a private train, Orlando (Ralph Fiennes, far left) shares what he
knows about Grigori Rasputin, while, from left, Shola (Djimon Hounsou),
Conrad (Harris Dickinson) and Polly (Gemma Arterton) listen attentively.

Whereas 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and 2017’s Kingsman: Golden Circle are deranged, profane and gleefully over-the-top comic book burlesques, this new entry is only mildly naughty. It’s more accurately a sly bit of alternate history, with director/co-scripter Matthew Vaughn — and co-writer Karl Gajdusek — setting their cheeky Kingsman origin story against the very real horrors of World War I.

The tone is more akin to a Golden Age classic such as 1939’s Gunga Din … albeit with dollops of 21st century hyper-violence.

 

Key events are rigorously accurate: from the triggering assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which set the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) against the Triple Entente (France, Russia and Britain); to the ghastly horrors of trench warfare that claimed the lives of an estimated 9 million soldiers.

 

Other films have depicted the latter more authentically — director Sam Mendes’ 1917 immediately comes to mind — but Vaughn, Gajdusek and production designer Darren Gilford convincingly establish a similarly grim tableau. One sequence, achieved with some clever CGI, is particularly effective: a bit of time-lapse legerdemain that reveals the impact of two years’ of war, as a pastoral Western European landscape transforms into a barren wasteland laden with mutilated corpses.

 

But this comes a bit later. The conceit of Vaughn and Gajdusek’s script is that this nation-shattering abattoir was orchestrated clandestinely, behind the scenes, by a nefarious cabal whose many members include Russia’s mad monk, Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans). Their leader, known only as The Shepherd — he remains unseen, as with the early 1960s machinations of James Bond’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld — is motivated by an enraged hatred of England, for its centuries-old repression of Scotland.

 

Meanwhile…

 

Following a brief 1902 prologue set during South Africa’s Boer War, during which we meet Orlando, the Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), and his young son Conrad (Alexander Shaw), the story flashes forward a dozen years. Fiennes excels at this sort of refined, crisply authoritative figure; Orlando is unapologetically aristocratic but also mindful of his station, and the need to behave honorably for the common good.

 

As a result of events during that prologue, he’s also a devoted pacifist: a philosophy that increasingly puts him at odds with the impetuous Conrad (now played by Harris Dickinson), who — like so many young men of his era — wishes to prove his bravery in “glorious battle.”

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: A tasty treat

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018) • View trailer 

Four stars. Rated TV-14, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.28.20

Films with excessively long titles generally should be regarded with suspicion.

 

As two classic examples, nothing can be gained from watching 1962’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? or 1967’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad.

 

As the members of the Guernsey book club watch with varying degrees of amusement —
from left, Isola (Katherine Parkinson), Eben (Tom Courtenay), young Eli (Kit Connor),
Amelia (Penelope Wilton) and Dawsey (Michiel Huisman) — Juliet (Lily James, far
right) bravely agrees to taste the infamous potato peel pie.

Happily, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society — exclusive to Netflix — is an entirely different creature: a solid British charmer from director Mike Newell, who brought us Enchanted April, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Mona Lisa Smile. Scripters Don Roos, Kevin Hood and Thomas Bezucha have fashioned a solid adaptation of the best-selling 2008 book by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: not an easy task, given that it’s an epistolary novel, composed entirely of letters written between characters.

 

(Actually, the book’s creation is a fascinating story unto itself; curious souls are encouraged to research how Shaffer came to write it … but was unable to finish it.)

 

We meet author Juliet Ashton (Lily James) midway through a cross-country tour to promote her newest book; the setting is 1946, in a post-war England just beginning to rebuild itself. She is accompanied by publisher and best friend Sidney Stark (Matthew Goode), a solicitous fellow with the good-natured patience to tolerate his favorite writer’s occasional whims.

 

Such as her impulsive decision, following the exchange of a few letters, to visit the island community of Guernsey. Her curiosity is piqued by a farmer named Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), who mentions belonging to a local book club dubbed, yes, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

 

Her departure displeases dashing American GI Mark Reynolds (Glen Powell), whose proposal she has just accepted (too rashly, we suspect). Even so, he graciously agrees to await her return.

 

Juliet’s arrival in Guernsey is greeted with enthusiasm by Dawsey and the other book club members: Eben Ramsey (Tom Courtenay), Amelia Maugery (Penelope Wilton) and Isola Pribby (Katherine Parkinson). Juliet soon learns that the “Society” was concocted during the early days of Guernsey’s German occupation, as a fabricated justification for breaking curfew (briefly revealed in a flashback prologue).

 

Needing to maintain the charade in order to satisfy a Nazi chaperone, the Society continued to meet on a regular basis. Even after their “minder” grew bored and stopped attending, the group realized how much they valued a book’s ability to whisk them away from what had become a bleak and brutal existence.

 

Official Secrets: Thou shalt not lie

Official Secrets (2019) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.13.19

This fact-based drama could not be better timed.

More than ever, we must be reminded of the imperative necessity of speaking truth and integrity to power.

Once exposed and arrested, Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) is allowed a brief visit from
her husband, Yasar (Adam Bakri). In a touching act that feels genuine, he brings her a
thick jacket, because he knows the jail cell will be cold.

Along with the value of the Fourth Estate, and its role in exposing the filthy secrets of power-mongers who believe they can get away with anything.

And of the foolishness of reflexively relying on a crutch such as Spell check.

Director Gavin Hood makes smart, thoughtful films that don’t get near enough attention in the mainstream market. Folks who stumbled across 2015’s Eye in the Sky were mesmerized by its intriguing depiction of a wartime conundrum — do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few? — as it related to the potential civilian fatalities that would result from a drone strike targeting a suicide bomber.

Hood’s film had the intensity of an intimate stage drama, and it was comforting (if naïve) to imagine that the civilian/military chain of command actually might ponder such consequences. At the end of the day, though, Eye in the Sky — however provocative — remains a mere philosophical exercise, because it’s fictitious. 

That’s not the case with Official Secrets. 

Hood’s newest film isn’t merely a depiction of actual events; it illuminates an impressively brave act that should be a humiliating footnote in this country’s reckless 2003 invasion of Iraq. Instead, the incident is all but unknown on this side of the pond … which, frankly, is shameful.

It made far more noise in England, where — to this day — people debate whether Katharine Gun is an honorable patriot on par with our own Daniel Ellsberg … or a traitor to her country.

That should be enough to get you into a movie theater. Better still, Hood and his co-scripters — Gregory and Sara Bernstein, adapting Marcia and Thomas Mitchell’s nonfiction book, The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War — have crafted their film with the clever precision of a multi-act suspense thriller.

Somewhere toward the middle, you’ll begin to wonder: How the hell could we not have known about this?

Add a terrific ensemble cast of top-notch British actors, and you couldn’t ask for more.

Allied: Does love bind?

Allied (2016) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity, fleeting nudity and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.25.16

At first blush, this feels like an old-style WWII espionage drama of the sort whose absence is lamented by longtime moviegoers — such as my parents — who often grouse that They Don’t Make ’Em Like This Anymore.

Shortly after adopting his cover identity as the devoted husband of Marianne (Marion
Cotillard), Max (Brad Pitt) fears that he may have been recognized by a Nazi officer: a
potential catastrophe that requires a quick solution...

Given the French Moroccan setting, stars with the wattage of Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, and a swooningly romantic script that even name-checks Casablanca, one almost expects Bogie and Bacall to come strolling in from the surrounding desert.

Steven Knight is a terrific screenwriter, with solid experience in the crime and espionage genres; his highlights include 2002’s Dirty Pretty Things and 2007’s Eastern Promises. No surprise, then: He delivers a corker of a first act for Allied, and then swings the plot into an unexpected direction that cranks up the suspense.

Unfortunately, things get messy during an contrived third act, which piles eye-rolling coincidence atop unrealistic behavior, the latter from characters who’ve previously been depicted as far too intelligent, to suddenly turn brainless. Cut to a positively eye-rolling epilogue, and the film squanders the considerable good will that it has built.

Seriously, Steven ... what were you thinking?

In fairness, such climactic, over-the-top melodrama also is old-school, so Knight and director Robert Zemeckis obviously knew precisely what they were doing. I’m simply not sure that today’s savvier viewers will be as willing to forgive such theatrical excess, as was the case back in the 1940s and ’50s.

And it’s a shame, because the first 90 minutes are thoroughly compelling, and — yes — luxuriously atmospheric.

The year is 1942, and the film opens as Canadian airman Max Vatan (Pitt) parachutes into the desert outside of Casablanca. His emergency mission, orchestrated by the British Special Operations Executive (BSOE): to assassinate Germany’s visiting ambassador. The groundwork for this mission has been established by undercover French resistance fighter Marianne Beauséjour (Cotillard), who has spent weeks among her Nazi “friends,” waxing eloquent about the beloved husband soon to visit from Paris.

The handsome and affable Max looks and sounds the part ... to a point. As Marianne immediately notices, his carefully rehearsed accent is more Québécois than Parisian, which is a problem: French Moroccans wouldn’t know the difference, but he’d never fool Nazi officials who had spent any time in France.

self/less: Absorbing sci-fi analysis of identity

self/less (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for violence, dramatic intensity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang

It’s an old, old lesson: When something seems too good to be true ... it is.

At first blush, scripters David and Àlex Pastor have concocted what feels like a sinister medical thriller, of the sort that put physician-turned-novelist Robin Cook on the map back in the late 1970s. Director Tarsem Singh keeps the tone atmospheric during a first act that raises all sorts of intriguing questions, with the New Orleans setting adding an unsettling, almost-but-not-quite indiscernible layer of tension.

Having finally discovered that the woman (Natalie Martinez) and little girl (Jaynee-Lynne
Kinchen) in his odd visions are actual people, Damian (Ryan Reynolds) tries to make
sense of an already fantastic situation that has gotten even stranger. Trouble is, plenty
of people have no interest in allowing him the luxury of such answers...

Then — also much like a novel by Cook or Michael Crichton — things shift into a different gear, and suddenly we’re in pure Hitchcock territory: our hearts engaged with a protagonist pursued by shadowy unknowns, who cannot — for reasons related to his plight — turn to official authorities.

All of which is even more interesting because we’re not sure we should like our not-so-innocent hero.

The result is an economical thriller that benefits from the Pastor brothers’ carefully crafted narrative. They avoid serious mistakes, and everything holds together pretty well. And if we’re able to anticipate a conclusion which, in the third act, seems increasingly inevitable ... well, that’s okay. It’s the proper way to end this story, and we exit the theater quite satisfied.

Billionaire New York City-based industrialist Damian Hale (Ben Kingsley) has made no allies on his way to the top, and he still enjoys crushing anybody who gets in his way. He’s a selfish, arrogant man with no family connections, having long ago lost touch with his activist daughter, Claire (Michelle Dockery), even though her volunteer-staffed office is only a few blocks away in the same city.

Damian’s only real connection is with lifelong friend and right-hand man Martin O’Neil (Victor Garber): also the only person who knows that his boss is close to losing the one battle he cannot win, against the cancer that is eating him alive.

But an unexpected option exists, courtesy of a clandestine organization led by Albright (Matthew Goode), who offers a radical form of immortality to hand-picked clients with the wealth and resources to make it practical. Albright has developed the technology to transfer an individual’s mind into a new, lab-cloned body. The process, dubbed “shedding” — in a nod to the way reptiles shed their skin — can put Damian into the body of a healthy male at the prime of life.

He jumps at the opportunity.

But the process is illegal, of course, and the catch is that Damian Hale cannot return to his old life. As far as the world is concerned, he has died; Albright supplies a new identity, carefully funded by Damian’s fortune, and “Edward” begins his new existence in New Orleans. The transition is euphoric: a fast car, faster women and the casual vigor that comes from a well-toned body in excellent condition.

The Imitation Game: What price genius?

The Imitation Game (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and rather harshly, for mature content and occasional sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

Mankind has an unfortunate tendency to devour its champions. Always has, likely always will.

We’re also not very tolerant of those who are different, whether in appearance or behavior. During times of crisis, such eccentricities are regarded even more suspiciously.

Despite indifference and outright hostility from some of his Bletchley Park colleagues,
Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) proceeds doggedly with the creation and
construction of a massive "thinking machine" that he hopes will break the German
"Enigma code" that has frustrated Allied efforts for so long.

Norwegian-born director Morten Tyldum’s handling of The Imitation Game employs shaming and ostracization as dramatic plot points: issues every bit as significant as the WWII-era predicament that brings young mathematician Alan Turing to the unusual code-breaking operation at Buckinghamshire’s Bletchley Park.

As scripted by Graham Moore and depicted by star Benedict Cumberbatch, Turing is a social outcast by virtue of his utter obliviousness to decorum and protocol. He affects a level of bland arrogance that infuriates everybody, yet remains utterly bewildered by how he is perceived by others.

This characterization places Turing squarely “on the spectrum,” to acknowledge the phrase du jour ... and I can’t help feeling that this artistic decision may have been propelled more by our current fascination with such characters — think Hugh Laurie’s Dr. Gregory House, or Cumberbatch’s own modern spin on Sherlock Holmes — than by authenticity.

This film’s opening credits are a bit deceptive, implying that Moore concocted this screenplay on his own. Only when we hit the closing credits can sharp-eyed viewers spot, in tiny print, a reference to Moore’s script being adapted from Andrew Hodges’ 1983 biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma. And while Hodges drew upon ample sources to confirm Turing’s impatience with bureaucracy and the grinding sluggishness of the military chain of command, Moore’s decision to re-cast this as full-blown autism is ... well ... historically suspect.

That said, it allows Cumberbatch to inhabit another of his fascinating, eccentricity-laden characters: a fresh performance that never ceases to be both fascinating and entertaining. Tyldum clearly recognizes this, choosing to open his film with Turing’s initial interview in the office of Bletchley Park Commander Alastair Denniston (Charles Dance). It’s a hilarious, impeccably timed display of rat-a-tat dialogue between an increasingly annoyed Denniston and the calmly indifferent Turing.

Indeed, such unruffled disdain later leads to the film’s funniest line, when one of Turing’s colleagues comments, in the aftermath of a particularly blunt display, “Popular in school, were you?”

Likely not, but that’s hardly the point; Turing’s unlikely presence at Bletchley Park, juxtaposed against the increasingly importance of his work, is what makes this film so engaging.

Stoker: A chilling family affair

Stoker (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for violence, disturbing sexual content, dramatic intensity and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.29.13

In Chan-wook Park’s corrosive view of the universe, blood isn’t merely thicker than water; it positively congeals the connective tissue of inherited moral putrescence.

And nurture doesn’t stand a chance against nature.

India (Mia Wasikowska) loves to play the piano; it's a great way to release tension.
Charles (Matthew Goode) also enjoys the instrument, but his fondness seems more
directed at playing with his niece ... and the resulting duets turn rather creepy.

Park, the South Korean director known for gorgeously stylized but grimly unsettling thrillers such as 2003’s Oldboy and 2009’s weirdly disturbing Thirst, has made an equally disconcerting American debut with Stoker. This new film is gorgeous to look at, with cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung creating captivating magic with every frame, but the on-screen beauty is at odds with the casual rot festering within our three primary characters.

That juxtaposition is intentional, of course, as is the undercurrent of amused detachment that laces every scene in Wentworth Miller’s gleefully nasty script. These characters taunt, torment and torture each other with an élan the Borgias would have admired, and Park orchestrates the mayhem in a manner that essentially dares us to enjoy the depravity right along with them.

Some of the humor is obvious, starting with the connotations raised by Miller’s choice of a family name — Stoker — or the affectionate nod toward Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, by naming Matthew Goode’s unhinged interloper Uncle Charlie. But we also can’t help chuckling at the enthusiastically carnivorous manner in which Goode tears into his character; rarely has evil been this charming, tempting ... and forbidden.

The film opens as India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), recently turned 18, stands at the edge of a field, staring intently at something within. She describes herself cryptically via off-camera narration, adding a layer of poetic eloquence to a tableau that already seems vaguely wrong.

The scene shifts to an India who seems slightly younger and significantly more withdrawn; we understand that we have retreated in time, but not too much. This is her 18^th birthday, and she’s indulging in her favorite annual treat: finding the “special” present from her beloved father, who always hides it in a cryptic manner. The gift itself doesn’t matter all that much, and in fact it’s the same every year: a fresh pair of saddle shoes (definitely not an accidental choice on Miller’s part, given the shoes’ striking contrast between black and white).

No, India anticipates the thrill of the hunt, and the knowledge that her father has gone to so much trouble to please her.

Leap Year: Leap of faith

Leap Year (2010) • View trailer for Leap Year
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for mild sensuality and milder profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.14.10
Buy DVD: Leap Year • Buy Blu-Ray: Leap Year [Blu-ray]


This film is a triumph of star talent over thin material and ham-fisted execution.

Honestly, whatever Amy Adams and Matthew Goode were paid for this limp romantic comedy, it wasn't enough. Absent their considerable charm and engaging chemistry, this tired flick wouldn't even rate release as a late-night cable original.

Every time Declan (Matthew Goode) ticks her off, or they miss one of their
travel connection -- both events sometimes occurring simultaneously -- Anna
(Amy Adams) petulantly hits the road again, rolling her Louis Vuitton suitcase
in her wake, like a misbehaving child. No matter how thin his patience wears,
Declan is too much a gentleman to let her trundle off alone, and so he follows
in her heel-clacking wake. True love must be just around the next corner, right?

But Adams, bless her heart, sparkles in every scene ... and Goode isn't far behind. Both embrace this predictable material as if it were as fresh as the Irish countryside, which offers its own radiance. The company filmed on location, and we're treated to stunning Irish vistas and picturesque countryside rambles in and around Dun Aengus, Wicklow, Dublin and — most impressively — the Aran Islands.

Too bad Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont's script can't live up to the scenery.

Worse, still, that Anand Tucker's direction — and most particularly Nick Moore's editing — don't even live up to the script.

Adams stars as perky Anna Brady, an "apartment stager" who has tired of waiting for longtime boyfriend Jeremy (Adam Scott, utterly unmemorable) to pop the question. Reminded of a family legend by her father (John Lithgow, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo), Anna decides to surprise Jeremy, who has flown to Dublin for a cardiologist convention, by following and proposing herself.

This is in accordance with the swooningly romantic Irish "leap year tradition" that "allows" women to take the lead.

(We'll skip the raised-eyebrow surprise at such a story emerging in the enlightened 21st century, as opposed to, say, the 1940s or '50s, when such a premise would have been much more appropriate. By now, I suspect women have been proposing to men for decades.)

Alas, bad weather forces Anna's plane into an emergency landing far short of Dublin, and she eventually winds up in a small-town Irish bar/hotel run by Declan (Goode), a mildly surly bloke who is quite amused by this prissy, displaced American. They eventually negotiate a fee for his driving her to Dublin, and set off on a road journey destined to be fraught with complications and missed connections, some of them far more contrived than funny.

Indeed, this film's early scenes are clumsy enough to be off-putting. Anna's attempt to re-charge her BlackBerry, late the first night, would have been amusing enough when an ill-fitting charger blows the power grid in this entire hamlet; was it absolutely necessary for her to trash her room as well, by blundering about like a bull in a china shop?

Brideshead Revisited: Too brief a visit

Brideshead Revisited (2008) • View trailer for Pineapple Express
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for chaste nudity and some sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.8.08
Buy DVD: Brideshead Revisited • Buy Blu-Ray: Brideshead Revisited (2008) [Blu-ray]


Much as I wanted director Julian Jarrold's handling of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited to stand on its own merits, this big-screen adaptation pales when compared to 1981's 11-hour British miniseries, which became such a must-see event for so many fans.

Although he has been brought to the Brideshead estate as a guest of the
emotionally fragile Sebastian (Ben Whishaw, right), with whom he even
indulges in a summer fling, Charles (Matthew Goode) changes his tune upon
meeting his friend's sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell).

Even at a relatively economical 336 pages, Waugh's 1945 novel is a dense read with an extremely weighty subtext: the decline of the English Catholic aristocracy, as viewed through the eyes of an unsophisticated, middle-class young man — Charles Ryder — utterly out of his depth after getting tangled within the toxic relationships that characterize the aristocratic Flyte family.

John Mortimer (Rumple of the Bailey), the genius author and playwright who adapted the book for the 1981 miniseries, had both the narrative skill and the leisurely pacing necessary to showcase all of the book's many characters; the result was a sumptuous, melodramatic feast that left viewers feeling that they had, indeed, witnessed the passing of an entire British era.

This new film, by comparison, limits its concerns to Charles and the key members of the Flyte family; we get no sense of the story's broader implications. Writers Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock concentrate so relentlessly on this particular family's Catholic guilt that we eventually view them as a dysfunctional aberration, rather than a symbol of the crumbling class structure taking place throughout the entire country.

Then, too, the focus on the story's primary romantic triangle takes place at the expense of all the equally fascinating supporting players, not to mention several other members of the Flyte family. (I particularly miss the wonderfully flamboyant Boy Mulcaster, reduced here to a pair of eyeblink cameos.)

And when this condensed character treatment is coupled with the film's disconcerting habit of diving back and forth in time, sometimes leaping ahead many years and leaving us to wonder what took place in between, or what year we're in now, the result feels like a badly hacked-up version of what should have been at least a four-hour film.

Jarrold and editor Chris Gill get no points for narrative clarity.

On the positive side, the film absolutely drips with an atmosphere so simultaneously opulent and poisonous that we cannot help feeling the moral decay that plagues so many of these characters. Then, too, the acting is uniformly excellent, and this is no small thing; anything less, and I'd be making unfavorable comparisons to the miniseries' Jeremy Irons (Charles), Anthony Andrews (Sebastian Flyte) and Diana Quick (Julia Flyte).