Turning Me Into A Reactionary, One Adaptation At A Time
Posted by Matt Zeitlin on July 27, 2008
At what point can we say that a filmmaker is essentially committing heresy. Sure, there have been plenty of bad adaptations of great books, and even some adaptations that have played with some themes and messages that were ambiguous in the original text (Starship Troopers Comes To Mind), but what the creative team behind the new Brideshead Revisted movie is lanning seems to be nothing less than using Waugh’s creative masterwork (just read it) to promote a message that is 180 degrees contrary to what Waugh was actually trying to say:
“In that tug between individual freedom and fundamentalist religion, there’s a story that’s apposite for our time,” Mr. Brock said. “In the modern age that’s something we’re all dealing with.”
An important divergence in tone from Waugh’s novel, Mr. Jarrold said, comes in the closing scene, when Charles — now back at Brideshead during World War II — talks to Lieutenant Hooper, a fellow soldier who has a rough accent and the forthright views of a modern man unimpressed by the aristocracy. How to portray him led to long discussions about the way that Waugh “is sometimes profoundly undemocratic” and disdainful of Hooper and what he represents, Mr. Jerrold said.
In the book Hooper is “described as a traveling salesman with a wet handshake,” he said. “But he’s the future of England, and the hope of the 1945 generation, and we’ve put a positive spin on him.”
If one wants to make a movie about how fundamentalist religion is outdated, how tradition inhibits individual flourishing and how the aristocracy is an archaic, pointless institution; simply write a script with all that stuff in it. But by taking Waugh’s book - which contains some of the most sensitive descriptions of exactly why tradition, and more specifically Catholicism, has such power over people’s lives - is something akin to theft or sacrilege. What makes Jerrold’s revisionist quest all the more infuriating is that his criticism of Waugh isn’t particularly original or “modern.” Brideshead was always considered to be a bit florid and even reactionary. It’s just that no one ever saw it fit to totally invert the message of the book to make some rather obvious, shallow criticisms.
