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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2272 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-03-09
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 128 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
It’s always a danger to go back and offer a fresh take on a classic text that’s already made the transition to television so well. In the case of Brideshead Revisited, the 1981 miniseries has become so revered that it’s understandable few have been tempted to tackle it since. Enter, however, writers Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, who have taken Evelyn Waugh’s novel, and created a television movie worth considering.

Set in 1925, the story of Brideshead Revisited doesn’t easily fit into a feature running time, but the end result still works well. The life of the Marchmain family, under the ultra-critical eye of Lady Marchmain (played by the excellent, as always, Emma Thompson, in a quite small role) throws together romance, religion and a handy dose of obsession too, as outsider Charles Ryder gets invited to the Brideshead estate by Sebastian Flyte. Inevitably, the pace of the production is a little too quick at times, and following all of the characters takes some work. Yet this is a solid piece of period drama.

What it isn’t is a rival for the original miniseries, and perhaps that’s why this take on Brideshead Revisited went down the television movie route instead. The consequence is that it does feel a little cramped, and while the production values are good, a bit more breathing room in the running time wouldn’t have hurt. Still, as it stands this is a perfectly fine take on the novel, even if it never has pretensions to be the definitive one. --Jon Foster

DVD Description
Privilege. Ambition. Desire. At Brideshead Everything Comes at a Price.

A heartbreaking romantic epic, this adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel tells an evocative story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence.

Oxford 1925.

The unworldly undergraduate Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) is befriended by the flamboyant and aristocratic Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), son of Lord and Lady Marchmain (Michael Gambon and Academy Award-Winner Emma Thompson), and is thrilled by an invitation to Brideshead, the Marchmain’s magnificent ancestral home. Beguiled by his surroundings, Charles is entranced by the opulent house and the glamourous world of this eccentric family. While Lord Marchmain lives in Venice with his mistress, Lady Marchmain runs the house, the failure of her marriage redoubling the fierce Catholic faith imposed on her children – Sebastian and the beautiful Julia (Hayley Atwell).

As Charles’s infatuation moves from the provocative Sebastian to the sophisticated Julia, it is a faith with which he finds himself increasingly at odds…

Special Features
Director’s commentary, Cast & Crew interviews, Creating Brideshead, Four Pivotal Scene Featurettes and Picture Gallery

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Customer Reviews

3 1/2 Stars: Hiding in Plain Sight
This latest version of Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" is a middling success: neither a triumph nor a failure. More importantly it does not diminish the grandeur and mighty ghost of the 1980's Masterpiece Theater production with Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder and Anthony Andrews as Sebastian though Matthew Goode (as Ryder) and Ben Whishaw (as Sebastian) do their best, through good and cogent performances, to top their predecessors. And while Irons and Andrews operated in a production that ran many hours and therefore had the luxury of time to define their characters, Goode and Whishaw have only 2+ hours to focus and grab our attention.
Director Julian Jarrold and writers Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock do a more than competent job of reshaping the sprawling Waugh novel: though at times it seems that we are watching a cavalcade of characters and locals as the protagonists flit from London to Venice to Morocco at breakneck speed.
"Brideshead Revisited" takes place during that boozy, volatile and romantic period between the WWI and WWII and concerns a young Englishman of modest means and social standing, Charles Ryder. After he falls in with (by way of Sebastian becoming enthralled with Ryder at Oxford) Sebastian and Julia Flyte (Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell), brother and sister from an aristocratic family who live on a palatial estate called Brideshead, Charles is swept into a world that he both covets and spurns. As opposed to Irons, Goode plays Ryder as a wide-eyed stranger-in-a-strange-land: emotionally open to both the sumptuousness of Brideshead and its inhabitants. Though by the end of the film, Goode's Ryder is a successful Artist he is only slightly changed, slightly jaded from the Ryder who opens the film with a look of wonder and amazement. Goode's emotional and psychological journey spans a short walk to the park while Irons' spans the space between London and Morocco.
Much is made of the Flyte's Catholicism (it is at this point that the brilliant Lady Marchmain of Emma Thompson makes her entrance into the film) and of Ryder's Atheism and unfortunately Jarrold decides to develop this theme of the duality of religion (a religion that both nourishes your soul and life while at the same time a religion that also inflicts inhuman restrictions: or so says Waugh) into the last ¼ of the film which turns the film into a diatribe against religion instead of a concurrent theme throughout the film. The last scenes of the film therefore feel as if they were spliced on from another film.
There is no doubt that "Brideshead Revisited" is beautiful to behold and the performances are first-rate especially Ben Whishaw as the alcoholic, doomed Sebastian. But in the final analysis, it fails to deliver the goods: the raw though reserved, the gloomy though blindingly white aura of Waugh's novel.

Rushed, painful adaptation
It is difficult to know who would prefer this film to the novel or TV series. There is a limit to how far Emma Thompson can go to save something and she doesn't save this. The value of this piece of work however is to show just how good the original television adaptation was. It was subtle, faithful and hugely enjoyable. It was also lavish and the product of a time when TV production companies had a lot more money to spend. My recommendation is that you get a copy of the original show - and read the book.

Dreadful
Caught this on a long plane trip to Australia - and it doesn't even belong as an airplane movie. It's dreadful. I was prepared that it could never match the beautifully produced Granada TV series from the early 80s, but never expected anything as facile as this. The only half decent thing is the narration which the director has tried to keep as close to a Jeremy Irons soundalike as possible. Ben Wishaw's Sebastian is portrayed as some flimsy, wimpish 'nothing'; there is none of the anger and conflict that comes at you through the book. Nothing of the subtlety of the TV series survives. I wasted 90 minutes of my life watching this in the vain hope that it might get better or that I might fall asleep. Even Emma Thompson can't save this from sinking further.

Forget this and go for the Granada original.