This theme must have attracted Waugh because he was a Catholic convert, and was fascinated by the division between Catholics and Protestants as a social as well as a religious issue. Of her daughter's love for Charles, she makes it clear that it is not the matter of his lower caste that is the problem (that could be lived with) but the fact that he is an atheist, and the Marchmains have been Roman Catholic from time immemorial. Of her son's proclivities, she professes a certain vagueness. To blame his disintegration on lost love would be too simple, however, because from being an alcoholic, he rapidly progresses into self-destruction in the hashish and opium dens of Morocco, his youthful perfection turned into a ghastly caricature.Īt the center of all of this is Lady Marchmain ( Emma Thompson, in a superb performance). Then Lady Julia comes into view, and during a later holiday in Venice, she and Charles fall in love - and Sebastian is shattered when he realizes it. The friendship between Charles and Sebastian during a summer holiday at Brideshead is enchanted, and platonic until a tentative but passionate kiss. Charles is not his type, is apparently not even gay, but that for Sebastian is the whole point, and he takes the boy under his arm. Sebastian is a dazzling youth, witty, beautiful, the center of a gay coterie. Time rolls back to the autumn day at Oxford, when Charles has moved into his ground-floor rooms just in time for Sebastian to throw up through the open window. His memories come flooding back, bittersweet, mournful. The novel begins during the war, when Charles is posted to Brideshead, requisitioned as a military headquarters. That he was a middle-class boy infatuated with the entire family - their inherited Marchmain title, their wealth, their history, their great mansion Brideshead - was in a way at the bottom of everything.
That he was previously, less ardently, in love with her brother Sebastian ( Ben Whishaw) was a complication. On board, he encounters Julia Mottram ( Hayley Atwell), who when she was Julia Flyte in the years between the wars, inflamed Charles with love.
The story is told by Charles Ryder ( Matthew Goode), who when we meet him, is a famous painter, a guest on a postwar Atlantic crossing. That is the dilemma in Evelyn Waugh's masterful novel Brideshead Revisited, made into an inspired TV mini-series in 1981, and now adapted into a somewhat less inspired film. No love story can be wholly satisfying in which the crucial decisions are made by the mother of the loved woman still less, when she is the mother of both the loved woman and the loved man, and believes she is defending their immortal souls.
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