Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

martin-intercultural In this new millennium, popular culture has refashioned the topic of "England between the wars" into a study of modern politics, paradoxically coupled with a whitewashing of much of the era's class relations and sensibilities. "Look," it seems to say, "the characters and their passions are just like us; only the costumes have changed." Stellar casting aside, this was more or less what I had expected of Brideshead. How delightfully wrong I was: There is not a trace of soapy melodrama on display here; no obsession with servant quarters' gossip. This is deep, thoughtful, existentialist reflecting and reminiscing on coming of age, on friendship, love including same-sex love, on marriage and family, on religious faith and how often its outward guises may belie a person's dark side. As it happened, I watched the DVD while grieving the sudden passing of my closest friend. I found myself weeping during some scenes, shuddering with delight at others.

wlfgdn This piece of fiction is little more than an neo-Renaissance anti-Catholic vitriolic morality play diatribe thinly disguised as literature.Although told from the viewpoint of innocent Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder, the plot revolves around Claire Bloom as Lady Marchmain and how her disingenuous religion destroys her family and friends. Lady Marchmain was forced to marry to achieve her position and has never forgiven her God for forcing her into this carnal action to achieve what she saw as her due.In return Lady Marchmain is punished first in the vulgar world when her husband deserts her, and then she is further punished by Providence which destroys her son and their relationship through his alcoholism.Always taking center stage is a great personal vanity which suggests that the faith which they swear by is merely another affectation, another lordly possession found somewhere after the fox hunt and before the lobster thermidor. No mercy is granted towards those who follow the Pope; even the kindest member of the family balks at the notion that a priest might better serve God by ministering to a larger number of people rather than the four or five family members who insist on maintaining a personal chapel for their convenience.The author and film-makers go out of their way to note that the servants of the family are Protestant, not Catholic, thus making more apparent the vanity of the personal chapel. We don't learn anything else about any servants. This is not about rich vs. poor, this is not about liberal vs. conservative, this is not about Manchester United vs. Chelsea, this is about Catholic vs. Protestant.Lady and Lord Marchmain both spend their final days in mental torment passing to their graves unredeemed by those who should have been their loved ones. The *cough* sinister hand of Popery also reaches out to deal rude slaps to family best friend Rex and eldest daughter Julia. No Protestants are punished by heaven, and former Protestant Rex is punished only after he turns Catholic to marry into the family.If instead of making a complex parable the curse was out in the open and instead of turning into a sot the Anthony Andrews character Sebastian Flyte turned into a vampire or werewolf, this would have been a lot more engaging. As it is, what we really have here is the closest thing to Elizabethan era anti-Catholic propaganda as you would be able so sneak into a good library or on public TV.As a work on film, it fails to make me care about any of the characters. In fact, after finishing episode three I was hoping the Sebastian character would maybe kill himself and quit wasting any more time. When you look over the entire cast, there is no more than one good human being among them, that being Lady Marchmain's youngest daughter.Even Charles, who is put forth as an innocent caught up in it all, is as much to blame for much of the misfortune as anyone else and demonstrates no less a failure of responsibility.Although this story is not about class, it does not do much to flatter nobility. But that is a function of fact, and behavior is portrayed realistically. If we want to look for a proverb here, we can say the film represents that those who shout at God the loudest, are heard by him the least.As a final insult to the gentry depicted here, none of them are ever shown to have any productive activities. They are highly wealthy aristocrats with large estates and many top notch servants, they run about the continent as they please. But not once does anyone have to run off to tend some family business or anything. There is just endless money for everything. Maybe the money is part of the religion thing. Their choice rewards them in the profane world with riches, but penalizes them in the divine world with damnation.Whatever their economic or social standing, most families will face some crisis at some time, and often more than one. It is not likely that every different crisis would have the same root cause. Religion could cause an issue, a family member marrying out of faith could cause problems for example. But problems also are caused by gambling, infidelity, politics and other catalysts. Here every problem is caused in some way, direct or indirect, by religion.The only thing you could add to this would be a Mother Courage type old woman in rags screaming "Bloody Papists! Bloody Papists!" Remember this principle: Never mistake effort for accomplishment.It's a street whore in a prom dress. It is a bottle of Château Lafite de Rothschild 1879 that has turned. It has John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier but before you harrumph too much might I say, "Inchon"? My final judgment? The opening segment showing troops in WWII is a portent. The British lost many lives fighting against the religious intolerance of the Nazis, but the author to begin with and those who made the film later seem not to have learned anything from it.

n-mo The reviewers who have given positive feedback for this series have done quite well and I have little to add. Sadly, there was one review that seemed to miss the point, and I would like to address this:"We can suppose that Lord Marchmain pretended to convert to comfort his family. There is no such excuse for Charles, who has seen the damage that Catholicism did to the whole family."Wrong. It was the shirking of religious principle that tore apart the family. Lord Marchmain left Catholicism and thought he had license to leave his wife, so he abandoned his children to a confused, fatherless upbringing. Had he remained true to his sacramental vow to stay, "for better or for worse," by his wife's side, the family would never have been so dysfunctional.As for the vague homo-eroticism in the first few episodes, many young men at Oxford back in the day did go through such phases and often they were in fact merely PHASES. Evelyn Waugh himself apparently did.

Afzal Shaikh It is hard for the younger viewer, like me, to appreciate the success of Brideshead Revisited. It is from a time when, in Britain, there were only three channels in Britain. Moreover, record players had not become widely available, and things were not often repeated. All this meant that the viewer had to tune in at the appointed time, or miss out. And in Brideshead's case most of Britain, from all sections of society, tuned in en masse, and it has been remarked that even dowager duchesses made sure to tune in, very apt for a series with a subject like Brideshead.Coming to see such a landmark of British Television over months on an ad hoc basis on DVD, as it spans over 600 minutes, did not detract from my own appreciation of the series. My jaw dropped at its expense and ambition, being an almost-complete filming of the famed wartime novel by Waugh, in the light of other TV productions from the late 1970's and early 1980's, with their cardboard sets and stagy (not to mention stodgy) direction.Charles Ryder is a single child from a small conservative, Anglican middle class family, consisting only of himself and his oddball father, the elder Ryder. Charles meets Lord Sebastian Flyte at Oxford in the late 1920's. Ryder, a serious-headed student, is seduced by Sebastian's louche, jazz age, unorthodoxly-catholic life, and becomes his close friend and lover. Sebastian gives him an entry into the higher echelons of English society and Ryder becomes closely involved over the next decade with the Flyte family, consisting of Sebastian's proper but thick older brother, Lord Bridy, and his two sisters, Julia and Cordelia, and their separated parents, the distant Lord Marchmain and the nearer Lady Marchmain. She is observant and graceful, yet distant in her own, more emotional, way.The quality of the characterisation is astounding and mirrored by the high-class acting. In amidst wonderful performances by the stellar cast (as well as younger actors such as Diana Quick, Phoebe Nicholls, Nickolas Grace, Simon Jones and Anthony Andrews) Jeremy Irons, in the central role, evinces a wonderful subtlety, perfectly suited to the restrained but passionate Ryder, and also narrates superbly, in character, the restrained but passionate story.Brideshead Revisited has a fey, conservative reputation that it does not wholly deserve. It is true that this TV adaptation does not correct the novel's middle class obsequiousness in its view of the decline of the English aristocracy, and at times it is too reserved in its view of the sexual relationship between Charles and Sebastian, which seems coy and a little elusive. But critics mistake its reserve. There is real depth in Brideshead Revisited- rather like large tectonic plates moving quietly but momentously beneath the surface- concerning issues like religion, sexuality and repression, alcoholism, the decline of the English aristocracy and the rise of the middle class, as well as the dehumanisation of war.It must be remembered that Ryder's journey into the upper echelons of English society via the Brideshead family- engaging and original in itself- is also a passionate and convincing allegory of the higher classes of English society between the two twentieth century world wars. Brideshead Revisited may owe a lot of this, and its general richness, to the fact that it is basically a filmed novel, but it has utilised the novel so well and filmed it with great care and dedication. It is for this reason that Brideshead Revisited arguably deserves its place at the top of British TV Adaptations.