You Can Go Home Again

Other omissions are painful but understandable: the extravagant, stuttering queen Anthony Blanche has been reduced to a cameo; young Cordelia barely registers; Ryder's father, played by John Gielgud on TV, has lost his best scenes. What remains, however, is formidable. Emma Thompson makes the iron-willed Lady Marchmain a figure both terrifying and sympathetic; Michael Gambon's lusty Lord Marchmain, who's abandoned his family for life in Venice with his mistress (Greta Scacchi), gets the most out of his brief appearances, and Atwell is a wonderfully sensual and sharp-edged Julia, torn between her love for Charles and her religious beliefs.

The toughest role, because it's so reactive, is Ryder himself. Because the film doesn't rely as heavily on voice-over to convey his inner thoughts, Goode faces a challenge illuminating the soul of this diffident, divided, ambitious man, whose own social and sexual aspirations even he doesn't fully understand. It's a solid, sensitive performance. He sounds remarkably like Irons, but he doesn't have Irons's quicksilver transparency, that ability to let us see the roiling feelings under Charles's formal English reserve.

Think of Jarrold's briskly paced, stylish abridgment as a fine introduction to Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy. It brings these unforgettable characters to life again, and if it sends people back to the novel, and back to the classic TV series, codirected by Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg, all the better. There's room for more than one "Brideshead" in this far less glamorous day and age.

© 2008