The New Criterion

In 1947, MGM negotiated with Evelyn Waugh for the film rights to Brideshead Revisited. Waugh was deeply suspicious of Hollywood. He referred to its denizens as "Californian savages" and lampooned them memorably in The Loved One. Hollywood didn’t much like Waugh, either: MGM proved completely unwilling to consider a Brideshead that was, as Waugh demanded, more theological meditation than romance. The deal soured, and there was no film. Three decades later, a marvelous television miniseries was produced. That’d be the end of that, then, eh? The masterpiece had miraculously escaped ruin. Well, not so fast. A while back we mentioned a new version in the works. Today we learn that

A lavish new big-screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited has a script, cast and even locations - but no director. David Yates (Sex Traffic) was slated to make it, but then Warners asked him to direct the new Harry Potter film, and he pulled out. "We’re looking for a new director now so that we can hopefully go into production next year," says Douglas Ray of the production company Ecosse Films. But who? It seems that directors from all over are being considered.

"Ang Lee did Sense and Sensibility," says Ray. "The Indian director Shekhar Kapur did Elizabeth. I don’t want to be parochial about it." Unlike the 1981 TV adaptation, the new movie’s screenplay - by period supremos Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies - focuses on the affair between Charles and Julia.

The sacred and profane memoirs of Captain Charles Ryder? We’ll just have the profane ones, thanks; we can do without all that other unpleasantness about sin, grace, and the soul. One wonders what the story of the affair, isolated from all that leads up to it, stripped of its theological and therefore emotional dimensions, will have to offer an audience. Silver screen steam in period dress? Don’t we already have PBS for that sort of thing?

In a 1963 Paris Review interview, Waugh said, "I used to have a rule when I reviewed books as a young man never to give an unfavorable notice to a book I hadn’t read." Well, call it intuition, but somehow I don’t think I need extend that courtesy to this film. I sincerely hope that that director’s chair stays empty: this is all the Brideshead I need.