'Brideshead Revisited' offers fresh look at British upper-class

There's no time like the first time, and so it is with "Brideshead Revisited."

If you saw the 1981 11-hour-long TV miniseries, a masterpiece, you may cringe at the thought of a feature-length remake. The miniseries, which aired on PBS in this country after its British premiere across the pond, was not only an artistic triumph but a pop culture phenomenon.

Americans tuned in on Sunday nights to see what happened next to Sebastian Flyte, the alcoholic charmer who dragged about his teddy bear, Aloysius, and attended spectacular parties at Oxford, at the palatial family estate, in Venice and, having given in to depravity and poverty, in Morocco. Sebastian was in love with his middle-class friend Charles Ryder, but in the early 1980s, that didn't stop quite straight fraternity guys from giving Sebastian Flyte parties. His high-society linen suits and the Brideshead estate, complete with fountains and peacocks, set American colonists into a fit of British envy.

The source, of course, was Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel about a dysfunctional family in the throes of the 1920s, a time when the rich faced the supreme threat that the world might be taken over by - shudder - people who were not from established families, were the wrong religion or, perish the thought, were not well dressed.

Of course, the real central character is not Sebastian but Charles Ryder, who, along with Nick Carraway in "The Great Gatsby," is one of the great wanna-bes of literature. Charles first falls in love with Sebastian (maybe) and then with his haughty sister Julia (maybe). Or maybe he just wants to hang around the rich folks at Brideshead and drink good wine. It's open to debate.

The feature film, which reduces the miniseries to a little more than two hours, seems like one of the more unnecessary projects of the summer. After all, the miniseries is available in a 25th anniversary collector's edition DVD set for about $60.

Should we ignore the fact that we ever saw the miniseries or read the novel and just review the movie on its own merits? Perhaps we should, but we can't.

I approached the new movie with the idea of how I would cut it, if I tried to tell this story in two hours.

Sitting through the first 30 minutes of the movie, a wonderful thing began to happen. They were cutting exactly the same things I would cut. Cordelia, the younger sister, can go. (She's a great character, but let's keep the focus on the Charles-Sebastian-Julia triangle). Bridey, the insufferable prig who is going to inherit Brideshead, can go. We can cut much of the World War II stuff, which merely serves as the present so there can be a flashback. We can cut the details of Julia's unfortunate marriage to the vulgarly rich American gambler Rex. It's enough just to know the marriage was a mess.

That leaves us the central story. Charles meets Sebastian at Oxford and is thrilled to visit the Marchmain estate and become friendly with the family. The guys thrash about nude in a fountain, making this film much more outwardly "gay" than either the novel or the miniseries. In olden days a glimpse of stocking was something shocking, but now the guys frolic.

Still, Charles is clearly more smitten with Julia. This drives Sebastian to drink and, eventually, to Morocco.

Brideshead, we must admit, makes Tara from "Gone With the Wind" look pretty shabby. It's played in the new movie by the same gorgeous estate used in the TV production.

Lady Marchmain (played by Emma Thompson here and by Claire Bloom in the original) is relentlessly Catholic. Never raising her voice, she goes around saying that everyone should be forgiven and that God will take care of it all. Charles' atheism is enough to disqualify him from any chance of marrying daughter Julia. Lady Marchmain would like to use Charles as a chaperone to keep son Sebastian off the suds and out of trouble.

Matthew Goode is fine as Charles, much more appealing than Jeremy Irons was in the original. We don't see this Charles as the total social climber that Irons was.

The casting of Ben Whishaw as Sebastian, though, was a mistake. This skinny swish makes Sebastian more pitiable than intriguing, and it's a major flaw. It must be believable that Charles, regardless of his own sexuality, would be obsessed with Sebastian. Anthony Andrews was perfect in the earlier version.

Julia should be a hottie whose Catholic guilt is the only thing that gets in the way of her passion. Hayley Atwell, who has the part in this film, is hardly anything to get excited about.

Thompson is wonderfully entertaining as Lady Marchmain. She puts everyone down royally - giving Charles his walking papers when he defies her by giving Sebastian money to buy liquor.

Her bitterness is surely fired by the fact that her husband ran off to Venice with his Italian mistress. The children visit him, which gives a wonderful excuse for gondola rides. Laurence Olivier played Lord Marchmain with a sense of menace in the TV version. Michael Gambon is excellent in a different way, suggesting Lord Marchmain might just want to have a good time.

All the stuff about Catholicism and how the religion stifles both sinners and nonsinners is brought in too late to seem more than a base that has to be touched.

Even in a summer when Batman is cast as Hamlet, we need some rest from comic-book brashness. Here's a fine chance to hobnob with the rich and to see how tragic they really are.

Pass the tea. With lemon and one lump of sugar, please.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com