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Brideshead Revisited [DVD] [2008]
 
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Brideshead Revisited [DVD] [2008]

DVD ~ Ben Whishaw
2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
RRP: £19.99
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Customers buy this item with Brideshead Revisited - Complete Series [DVD] [1981] DVD ~ Laurence Olivier

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Product details

  • Actors: Ben Whishaw, Jonathan Cake, Hayley Atwell, Greta Scacchi, Matthew Goode
  • Directors: Julian Jarrold
  • Format: PAL
  • Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: 12
  • Studio: 2 Entertain
  • DVD Release Date: 9 Mar 2009
  • Run Time: 128 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B001GXQSW4
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,409 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)

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Reviews

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…
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Customer Reviews

21 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
2.7 out of 5 stars (21 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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38 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars 3 1/2 Stars: Hiding in Plain Sight, 5 Oct 2008
By MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
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.
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Clueless, 9 Feb 2009
By Ford Ka (Edinburgh, Scotland) - See all my reviews
  
If you have some vague memories of reading Brideshead Revisited (or seeing the TV series) and the impression you were left with was that of a lovely, charming, but somewhat clueless period piece, this is your movie. The screenplay lost several essential parts of the novel and what we are offered is yet again charming, lovely etc but noticeably clueless. It is fairly obvious that a novel of such complexity (in case you missed it - yes, it is a novel of great complexity!) cannot be faithfully presented during two hours, still it is not an excuse for going against its spirit. Somehow the limited time did not stop the authors from introducing most of the original characters even if most of them do not get a chance to utter two full sentences in the movie.
Brideshead Revisited is a story of spiritual maturation of an artist set against the decline of the English aristocracy. Charles Ryder of the movie is an artist basically because we are told so quite repeatedly. Yes, he draws once, hangs a painting on the wall, and makes an appearance at an art show. Most of us have done as much in life and we don't think of ourselves as artists.
Part of the maturation is his multifaceted fascination with the beautiful Lord Sebastian Flyte (I find Ben Whishaw somewhat lacking in masculine beauty and a bathing scene stolen from Talented Mr Ripley did not help a bit) which Waugh sees as juvenile and aesthetic (and vaguely homoerotic although not necessarily homosexual which the movie blatantly suggests). It is only a stage for Charles and after some years he moves on to a heterosexual relation with Sebastian's sister Julia.
This vision of emotional development of a young man of British upper classes is apparently beyond the grasp of modern screenplay writers (the times are different, it is true) even if they included Cara (Sebastian's father's Italian mistress) explaining the issue very clearly at the Lido beach. Consequently, in the movie the two siblings fight for the attention of Mr Ryder in the lovely setting of Venice. When Julia wins the contest, Sebastian succumbs to alcoholism. This in turn elegantly spares the authors from any attempts of explaining his lot in any other way - he drinks himself to death because he was rejected by his lover. Neat, simple, and completely against the spirit of the novel. Not very rational as Sebastian of the movie fails to notice that for his sister it was just a conquest (meant to spite him? why?) from which she moves on to another affair with Rex. Apparently, poor Sebastian is far too drunk to notice by that time.
Probably, the spirit of the novel was too closely related to the Holy Spirit that the authors needed to exorcise at least some of it. They failed to note, however, that problems resulting from the characters' Roman Catholic faith were precisely the backbone that kept this (I agree) somewhat clueless though doubtlessly charming novel together. The result makes a nice viewing but if it leaves you asking endless questions "Why? Why? Why?" you have to resort to the original book. You will not find any answers in the movie.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars A Travesty, 10 April 2009
By Lovborg (London) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   
Wow: this is bad.
This isn't to say that there aren't good things in it: the performances of Ben Whishawe, Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon are all excellent, but almost everything else is lousy.
The script is dreadful, absolutely dreadful: there is no tension in it, no understanding of the structure or the themes of the book - and as a result, what we get is a very shallow, snobbish piece of work. There is a very simplistic reading introduced (that the middle class Charles wants possession of the great house at any price) in the absence of an ability to engage with what Waugh described as the theme of the book: the operation of grace on a diverse group of people.
Finally: and very surprisingly the attention to detail in the styling of costume and sets is really poor - notably the fact that all the Catholic women (who would have worn crucifixes) are all seen wearing crosses. It's not a truly unsettling detail, perhaps, but it is representative of the fact that the film-makers didn't really understand what they were grappling with.
The Granada adaptation really is magnificent - and a far better way to spend your money than on this rubbish.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars pleasing moments but too many liberties taken
Its really not a bad adaptation; necessarily condensed, beautifully shot and carefully produced. Most of Waugh's key themes are preserved, but adapter Andrew Davies takes too many... Read more
Published 3 days ago by tony mac

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a patch on the TV series
Not a bad effort but it really loses out on the build up of atmosphere and character development the TV series achieved. Read more
Published 2 months ago by R. Harrison

3.0 out of 5 stars Waugh in a minor key
Comparisons are invidious, particularly when the 1981 Grananda series had 11 episodes, two of them lengthy, to develop the characters and themes of Waugh's novel about the way the... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Stephen Bishop

3.0 out of 5 stars Oh dear........Trite Flyte...........
OK, without pre-judging the thing, I knew that this film, at two and a bit hours, could in no way compare with Granada's masterly television adaptation from the early Eighties. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Witless544

5.0 out of 5 stars Rather good, actually.....
Brideshead Revisited comes as a novel, a drama series and - recently- a feature length film. Each very good, in their own right. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Bart

5.0 out of 5 stars The best film ever
I saw the trailers of Brideshead Revisited, and since that moment I have been waiting for the film to be released. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Mt Principi

1.0 out of 5 stars If I could, I wouldn't give it any stars
This film is such a disappointment!!!!! We were willing to overlook the films overwhelming discrepancies from the novel, but we were shocked as an initial involvement, even to a... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Mrs. Susan Cairns

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, poignant, moving
I'd like to add my penneth to what appears to be overwhelming condemnation of this movie.

I am not familiar with the original series, and have not read the book, so... Read more
Published 5 months ago by K. Johnston

1.0 out of 5 stars 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. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Jonathan Carr

1.0 out of 5 stars brideshead revisted remake
I have watched this remake and definately find it very inferior to the original which was superb Why in heaven do they waste money on this dreadful film and try to make what was... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Mrs. V. Brentor

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