To fully understand the overwhelming putrescence of Brideshead Revisited, it is easiest to compare it to the corpse of Anna Nicole Smith. Sure she’s pretty to look at, but after about thirty seconds you realize how useless and dull she is, and fucking her is extremely unfulfilling and just makes you feel dirty. Watching Brideshead Revisited requires a shower, a decontamination treatment, and a large amount of lye poured into my eyeballs so I don’t have to ever watch something this terrible again. People often complain about how generic Hollywood films are, but it seems that the most cookie-cutter genre is the costume drama, as directors clearly believe that they can just shove some tits into a corset, push a camera down a hallway, and call it art. Julian Jarrold proves himself to be an utterly incompetent director, taking a story that spans a decade and distilling it into an unfathomably boring film with terrible characters and an entirely undeveloped story that never goes anywhere, merely dragging on interminably.
Can they please be returned to the Ralph Lauren catalogue?
Other than a meaningless exploration of why Catholicism sucks, that couldn’t have been relevant when the book was written, much less now, Brideshead Revisited is, to put it nicely, extremely generic. Lovers separated? Poor people and rich people in love? These are things I’ve never heard of before. Never has elicit sex and heavy boozing been more lifeless, with more blank stares than actual drama or conflict. Mathew Goode clearly has no idea what the heck was going on during filming, and has no place in a community theater play, much less an actual movie. Fortunately, his non-performance is overshadowed by the terrible performances of every other actor. Watching Ben Whishaw moan and whimper, and Hayley Atwell stare pathetically, blending in with the walls, made me wonder why more of these characters weren’t dying of consumption. Coughing up blood doesn’t constitute emoting, but it would have been more exciting than anything else that happened in this comatose drama. Someone needs to strangle Merchant-Ivory wannabe Julian Jarrold with a corset so that he will never unleash another terrible costume drama on the world again.
