Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) is a starving artist who happens upon the wealthy Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) a drunken, aristocrat who takes the liberty of vomiting in Charles’s room, during a weekend in Venice. Next thing we know Sebastian is cast under Charles’s spell at Oxford and befriends him. Taking Charles home to his blue blood mansion, Brideshead, we meet Sebastian’s sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell) and his Mother (Emma Thompson). And so the triangle begins. Sebastian loves Charles, Charles loves Julia, but Mother won’t allow her daughter to marry a man who’s not a Catholic. They’re estate screams money and fortune, while Charles has no money at all – only an appreciation for all that is art, love and decency. Unlike the typical British dramas of “Sense and Sensibility” this one has volumes of playful, sexual overtones between the “Our Father’s,” but drags in its story telling (apparently brevity is not wit.) It’s more a strenuous adaptation of the novel by Evelyn Waughe better left in book form. That said, enter Father Flyte, his mistress, and even “God” – playing into every turn of events – and soon we see that it’s inevitably impossible to escape the clutches of Brideshead, in book or movie form, without the constant longing to, well, revisit. Two and a half tiaras
