It was just a couple of days ago that I got around to reading Ross Douthat’s review of the new Brideshead adaptation in the Sept.1 National Review. Many of us had concluded from the publicity that it was going to be really bad and we weren’t interested in seeing it. If Douthat is right, so are we.
After noting that he is more likely than, for instance, me, to be open to it, because he doesn’t consider the book an untouchable classic and hasn’t seen the 1981 version, he continues:
Alas, the new Brideshead Revisited has one damning disadvantage: It was produced by a group of utter fools. Indeed, if the passel of philistines responsible for this botch of a movie didn’t exist, Waugh himself would have had to invent them. One can’t dismiss outright the possibility that the new Brideshead is some sort of posthumous prank by the master, and that its writers and director, in particular, exist only as Waughian send-ups of a certain modern movieland type, rather than as actual flesh-and-blood nincompoops. Not since Roland Joffe transformed The Scarlet Letter into a bodice-ripping vehicle for Demi Moore’s thespian ambitions (and surgically augmented breasts) has an adaptation of a classic novel labored so strenuously to miss the point of its source material.
He concludes that it must be “a satire of clueless, artless secularism.”
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