I saw Brideshead Revisted at my favorite theater with my good friend Rachel, Thursday afternoon. There was much munching of awesome concessions, like giant cookies and kettle popcorn, and hanging out in a theater that plays cool Indie Music as you wait in the dark for the screen to turn silver with the movie.
Brideshead is one of those heartrending movies with heartrending scores and performances. Costumes are to die for too.
Charles (Matthew Goode), with the grimmest father in the world, goes off to Oxford and by a chance of drunken projectile vomit becomes friends with Sebastian Flyte, a man who carries a teddy bear, is an alcoholic, and doesn’t take being gay as a phase in 1920s England. Ain’t he impressive?
This friendship acts mainly as Charles observing Sebastian, then the rest of his oppressed family at the House Charles Falls in Love With: Brideshead. And okay, maybe he also likes Seb’s sister Julia too.
The important thing is that Charles is an artist, an atheist, and is intrusted with keeping Sebastian’s blood alcohol levels under control. Oh, and staying away from Julia because his mother (played by the wonderful Emma Thompson) thinks atheists are too middle class to marry her daughter.
As a film, the story is based on relationships: Between friends, lovers, siblings, parents, and God. The aspect of Roman Catholicism is used as a means of keeping the Flyte children under heavy control by their mother and later on affects them through their relationships, most notably Julia and Charles. To Sebastian it stunts his growth, leaving him an impudent child prone to not getting what he wants and in love with attention.
The Brideshead estate acts like a player in the story, but more as a metaphor for the family as a whole. It is seen only once as a whole through Charles’s eyes. To him it is the most majestic place on earth, but every otehr scene with the house in it, it can only be seen in pieces. As the story progresses it falls into disrepair, with the stone work getting shabbier or with pieces falling out of the stairs or with the statues turing black, the big foutain of Once Upon a Time Male Skinny Dipping stopping it’s streams.
All that remains perfectly in tact inside th house are the religious works, the painting Sebastian admits to loathing and the family chapel, the only connecting pieces Charles has to the family for his appreciation of art and the mother’s love of the religion.
Charles cannot come out of his relationships with any members of the family unchanged, but after years away from those closest to him, he cannot abandon the memories. The house brings them together, the house let’s them fall. Another must-see of the summer.
