Bright Young Things Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)September 21st, 2004
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
Directed by Stephen Fry
Adapted by Fry from the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies
Rated R, 105 minutes
HELLHOUNDS OF ENNUI
Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh's satirical 1930 novel about sex, drugs, and jazz among the moneyed young set in England, pictured a generation living desperately for parties and amusement. Boredom was the enemy, and the more frantically the party-goers tried to keep it at bay, the more surely it seeped in like fog through the window sash.
After three-quarters of a century, the novel has finally made it to the screen thanks to Stephen Fry, the British writer/actor/comic best known here for his title role in the movie Wilde (1997). Vile Bodies has a reputation as one of the funniest novels in the language, and with the social frenzy of the Twenties reinventing itself, Fry saw a chance to comment on today's party animals and make use of some quality source material. He jettisoned Waugh's title, perhaps out of concern (as with The Madness of George III) that callow audiences would take it for a slasher flick. Bright Young Things, the moniker by which Waugh's fast crowd was known, was the obvious substitute.
It must be hard to make movie about frenetic partying without getting a bit frenetic yourself, and Fry's movie suffers from it. He plunges in, dancing as fast as he can, cutting like Jack the Ripper, whirling his camera, shuffling shots as if the hellhounds of ennui were on his trail. A lot of dialogue which is probably mordant as hell gets lost in the chaos, and characters take a while to sort themselves out.
The two upon whose relationship the story is armatured are Adam Fenwick-Symes (Stephen Campbell Moore), an impoverished writer, and Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer), a girl of aristocratic lineage who would like to marry Adam if only he could afford her. As the opening swirl of parties is underway, Adam is returning from France, where he has completed his first novel, Bright Young Things. He is on his way to deliver the manuscript to his publisher, Canadian-born media tycoon Lord Monomark (Dan Ayckroyd), when it suffers the indignity of being vomited on from an upper deck on the boat from Calais. This cause problems coming through a British customs already distrustful of literature ("If we can't stop literature in this country," sniffs an inspector, "we can at least stop it being brought in from the outside.") The manuscript is confiscated, and Adam's immediate prospects of income are sunk. "I say," he tells Nina, "I'm afraid we won't be able to get married after all."
But fortunes come and go in this story like guests at a party, and the young couple's marital prospects have many more reversals to endure before it's over. There is a Drunken Major (Jim Broadbent) who wagers some money for Adam on a horse, and there is Nina's father, mad old Colonel Blount (Peter O'Toole) to whom Adam goes to appeal for a loan. There is even a brief stint for Adam as a newspaper gossip columnist, Mr. Chatterbox, a perch from which he invents outrageous fictions about the smart set cooked whole from his novelist's imagination.
Meanwhile, it's party, party, party for that set. The Honorable Agatha Runcible, a sprightly dim-bright young society bulb played in one of the film's most delicious performances by stage actress Fenella Woolgar, wakes up from an impromptu sleep-over at the end of a night of peripatetic festivity to discover herself in the family quarters at 10 Downing Street, and brings down a government. But eventually the pace of life in the fast lane catches up to Agatha, and she becomes one of the mounting list of casualties in the bruising contact sport that is the nonstop social whirl.
Fun, it seems, can't last forever, and the pace slows considerably in the second half of the story, when increasingly the piper has to be paid. Adam sells his interest in Nina to his rival for her affections, the wealthy Ginger Littlejohn (David Tennant). War breaks out (Waugh had presciently anticipated the next major world conflict, still almost a decade away), the party's over, and the rpm count drops to a statelier pace that some will welcome, and some will regret.
Most of the principal roles in this movie are filled with relative unknowns, and they acquit themselves well. Campbell Moore weaves the detachment of an observer with threads of wit and longing, and Mortimer combines fragility and toughness and a determined sense of style. And Woolgar steals the show with her amiable detachment: gazing through the window of a taxi she muses "So many little people...what can they do with their lives?"
There are a few old pros in substantial roles, like the doughty Broadbent and the blustery Aykroyd, but many more are scattered with a wasteful profligacy. O'Toole leaves us wanting much more, Stockard Channing and Simon Callow are underused, Richard Grant barely registers, and the venerable Sir John Mills is reduced to snorting a line of cocaine in the background. Still, these are bright baubles scattered across the screen.
You can feel Waugh's novel straining to break through the celluloid. His literary lightness and deftness are often at war with the literalness of the movie form. When they do mesh, Bright Young Things is a sophisticated pleasure. When they don't, the party can be tedious.
More on 'Bright Young Things'...
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