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BRIGHT
YOUNG THINGS
5/10
UK (UK/US)
2003 : Stephen FRY : 105 mins
Bright Young
Things? Dim old Fry, more like. Adapting Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel
Vile Bodies, the esteemed and erudite comic actor – famously once
described as having “a brain the size of a planet” – for some reason to
updated the action from the late 20s to the late 30s. Such a ‘decade-shift’
isn’t that unusual in current cinema, even from first-time directors –
Roger Avary’s The
Rules of Attraction transferred Bret Easton Ellis’s eighties novel
to the present, and just about got away with it. Fry isn’t so fortunate,
mainly because his shift throws his whole screenplay out of kilter
– and it’s a heavy-handed attempt to add unwarranted depth by having Waugh’s
non-stop party suddenly halted by the rise of Nazi Germany.
And audiences
will, for much of the film’s length, be forgiven for failing to spot Fry’s
fatal shift: there’s a fleeting reference to (German foreign-minister)
Von Ribbentrop, but otherwise everything and everyone looks and feels
so very 1920s that it comes as a real jolt when someone turns on the radio
just as the Prime Minister is making his epochal “we are now at war with
Germany” speech. The later stretches include sombre sequences set in wartime
rural France, and in London during the Blitz – all of which are in very
stark contrast to the delirious, gleaming whirl of the opening hour.
This is the
section that works by far the best, as Fry takes equal parts Gosford
Park (which he was in), Moulin
Rouge, Party
Monster and Absolutely Fabulous and proceeds to shake,
shake, shake. The resulting froth, while admittedly insubstantial, is
sufficiently intoxicating to mask the plot’s shameless wispiness. Aspiring
author Adam (Stephen Campbell Moore) returns from ‘the continent’ with
the manuscript of his novel – to be entitled Bright Young Things.
He has an agreement with publishing magnate Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd)
which will provide sufficient financial footing for him to marry his sweetheart
Nina (Emily Mortimer) – both are from aristocratic families that have
fallen on hard times. But when a censorious customs official (Jim Carter)
impounds the manuscript as potentially obscene, the wedding is suddenly
off – and as Adam’s finances precariously see-saw, so do the chances of
his taking Nina up the aisle. Meanwhile, Nina’s financially-secure old
flame Ginger (Stephen Tennant) is waiting in the wings…
The Adam-Nina
story provides Bright Young Things with what flimsy spine it has,
but it’s really an entrée into the dazzling upper-class demi-monde of
a London no less ‘swinging’ than the sixties. Fry (and casting-director
Wendy Brazington) fill out the movie with a dazzling array of character/caricature
turns from familiar faces like Jim Broadbent, Simon Callow, Stockard Channing,
Richard E Grant, Julia McKenzie and Peter O’Toole. But the less-established
Moore, Tennant, Michael Sheen (as deliciously waspish Miles), and Fenella
Woolgar (as horse-faced dizzy-toff Agatha) make just as much of an impression
in what amounts to a succession of silly but enjoyable vignettes of upper-class
decadence – painted by cinematographer Henry Braham in suitably alluring,
glowing, coruscating technicolour.
Until, that
is, Fry feels the need for things to turn abruptly serious and the wheels
suddenly fall off the wagon – in a jarringly brief spell, the more colourful
characters are shunted off into exile (Miles) and madness (Agatha), and
our ‘hero’ Adam goes off to war. These are largely unconvincing developments
that smack heavily of scriptwriting contrivance – especially with regards
to Agatha, who almost overnight goes from amusing airhead to off-her-rocker
asylum inmate. As the energy level suddenly dips, Fry increasingly falls
back onto cliché and sentimentality – after creating these glittering,
chattering, fatuous dolls for our delight and mockery, he suddenly expects
us to feel for them as, one by one, their lives are overtaken by various
forms of tragedy. As the folk of Vile Bodies might put it, Fry
at this point really does become the most crashing, frightful bore.
December, 2003
(seen 1st December : Tyneside
Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
by Neil
Young
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