Product: Brideshead Revisited [VHS] (1982)
Rating: 4.0
Brilliant but the Politics are Odious
Waugh's masterpiece has been brought to perfect life in this 1981 adaption. Echoing the vapid lives of rich fools in post-WWI to WWII England, the story concerns the odious Charles Ryder a failed artist and his love for members of the aristocratic Flyte family, first the man-child Sebastian, and then his older sister Julia. Glossy, pretty, and well-acted, Brideshead Revisited has much to recommend it, including all those wonderful shots of Oxford, ocean Liners, Marchmain House and London, but to me, this story is even more rotten at the core than I first realized when I first saw in 1981. Waugh's right-wing politics and religious beliefs make this film feel more like a propaganda piece for Catholicism and all that entails. If you buy that, great. If it disturbs you to be told that if you are American, lower class, a worker, someone who creates work, someone who is not a Catholic, someone who stands up for their rights against the upper classes, someone who values their children, then you are of no-account to Waugh. Geilgud as Ryder's off-putting father takes this film, his hatred for his child, palpable, believable, and funny, steals this film.