Customer Reviews

Bright Young Things

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS is a rare gem of a movie. Based on Evelyn Waugh's landmark novel "Vile Bodies" and directed with great skill by Stephen Fry (in his directorial debut), the film is an exciting mix of great performances and a fabulous story.

Penniless author Adam Fenwick-Symes (Stephen Campbell Moore) resorts to drastic measures in order to get the neccessary funds to marry Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer), a carefree socialite who is one of the `bright young things', a group of young aristocrats for whom life is one endless party. Despite the looming spectre of the Second World War, nothing will stop these hedonistic creatures from living life to the fullest.

Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies" was set in an imagined future, but Stephen Fry has wisely (and quite effectively) placed the story in it's accurate historical timeframe. The story perfectly brings to life the generation born between the two wars who felt completely detatched from what occurred in the past and cared little for what lay ahead.

The cast is outstanding: Campbell Moore and Mortimer are wonderful as the central romantic couple Adam and Nina; surrounding them is a gallery of unforgettable supporting players. Fenella Woolgar steals the show as eccentric party-girl Agatha with James McAvoy and Michael Sheen in top form. There are also delightful cameo-style roles for illustrious stars including Stockard Channing, Sir John Mills, Julia McKenzie, Peter O'Toole, Simon Callow, Dan Aykroyd, Angela Thorne, Imelda Staunton and Richard E. Grant.

I was greatly impressed with this gem of a movie. BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS is a period film with a twist.

It is difficult to fairly assess a film when you've recently read and immensely enjoyed the book it was based on. Although - ideally - Bright Young Things should be evaluated for its own faults and merits and not be measured against Vile Bodies, I - admittedly - cannot help but compare it to Evelyn Waugh's biting comic satire.

For the most part, Bright Young Things is faithful to the plot of Vile Bodies. It follows the lives of several young London socialites as they hop from one glamorous party to the next, always with an air of wit and boredom, and it focuses on the might-be romance between Adam, a poor young writer, and his lovely fiance, Nina. Although light and comic on its surface, Bright Young Things also preserves the dark undercurrent that runs through the novel.

And yet, this film - in my opinion - misses the mark. To begin with, I believe that it spends too much time trying to develop its plot and not enough time lingering over the characters' verbal musings. Vile Bodies truly excels in its dialogue, not in the development of its story. And, because the makers of Bright Young Things apparently failed to realize this, the film is resultantly much less funny.

I also feel that Bright Young Things takes itself too seriously. The romance between Adam and Nina comes across as much more sincere in the film than it does in the book. Also, the film's ending is very different from the book's; it tidies things up neatly and inserts a sort of hopeful, moral. To me, this came across as forced and incongruent with the story.

I think Vile Bodies has the potential to be made into a great film. After all, with the abundance of dialogue, it reads more like a play than a novel anyway. Unfortunately, this film does not do the story justice. If you have read the book, I think you'll be disappointed. If you haven't read it - you might find this film - with its subtle, dry wit - funnier than your average comedy ... but, then again ... why not just read the book? It's better.

I very much like how Stephen Fry changed the title of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies to Bright Young Things and in essence said that they were different works entirely (something that he claims is a tradition in adaptations dating from the early days of film and theater) because where the book is sharp and nasty in places, Fry gives a nostalgic view of 1930s Britain from the perspective of the children of nobility, born just a little too late to miss WWI, filling their lives with parties, gossip and inventions.

Fry loves to use the old fashioned camera techniques (the wipe, the shrinking looney tunes circle) which adds to the general atmosphere of frivolity. Through a large cast of characters, he moves briskly through Waugh's novel with all the costumes, gambling, drug taking, suicides, car racing and society page gossip. Peter O'Toole as the doddering noble who may or may not be senile shines in the movie but the entire cast is excellent, especially Jim Broadbent as the Drunk Major.

As with the book, the frivolity turns tragic, but so its subtle enough that everything feels natural. And the comedy does remain throughout. The one unfortunate choice (at least for readers of the book) that Fry makes is to extend the plot for 15 minutes after Waugh's apocalyptic ending (he wrote it in 1932 and ends it with WWII - although he was only using that to end his book, not as a prediction) into a post-WWII happy ending. I don't know if I would have cared had I not read the book, but it does feel too jarring for anyone that enjoys the cynical original.

This movie based on Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies (which I admit I have not read) was a finely crafted peek into frivolous high society. The movie starts with a crazy, costumed, drug-infused party and an unfortunate young man (Adam Symes) who loses all his money. He constantly breaks off and reinstates his engagement with Nina depending on how much money he has. The first half of the money is full of the characters' hilarious confusion and lack of interest in anything and absolutely everything. Parties galore and the insult of the day is to be "boring".

Yet things take a sour turn as their pettiness starts to affect other peoples' lives. Then tragedy encroaches, and one sees that life can't be one big party (even if they really, really want it to be). The tragic elements make the characters real and makes the movie more than just a ficticious gossip column. Stephen Campbell Moore does a great job as the "innocent" friend caught up in a whirlwind of craziness. Though he acts the fine line well, since he is just as involved and guilty as everyone else. But you still have to love him! Fenella Woolgar is a wonderful comic relief, but she thankully brings us back to life when she talks of her "dream" of endlessly, pointlessly driving in circles. The upbeat big band music is uplifting yet also melancholy at times and provides great background to the action onscreen.

Great movie, and now I am going to go read the book!

Between the two World Wars, a group of young idealists,Bohemian in attitude and coming from either the artist/poet/musician throngs or from the idle sensationally bored upper class , needed to occupy their time with parties,fashion,drugs,booze,reckless living and the new way of thought,all to find some kind of meaning to life.They were known as "The Lost Generation".These were the days of Hemingway,Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.Lots of them tragic figures,brilliant beyond belief,but many brought to despair and suicide.

Actor Stephen Fry has adapted with great pizzazz Evelyn Waugh's satirical 1930 novel "Vile (Decaying) Bodies" in a rip roaring,carefree and "care-less" depiction of this group of Bohemian Richie-Riches known as "Bright Young Things".The film is fast paced and bawdy.The characters are feckless and obnoxious.They are living on the edge of disaster and the world flocks to read about them in the London Tabloids.In fact, they garner more attention than "The Royals".(Face it, has celebrity goings on ever changed? Britney beat out Obama in the headlines yesterday! C'mon?)These young people had no interest in politics,they treated money like water,and excess was the name of the game!They lived for the moment knowing that somehow it would end....but who cared?

I have always admired the generosity and sensitivity of Stephen Fry (BLACK ADDER,WILDE,PETER'S FRIENDS) as an actor these past 20+ years,and as a director I admire him even more.The cast assembled for this look at "The Lost Generation" is a veritable UK Who's-Who: Jim Broadbent,Imelda Staunton,James MacAvoy (currently in ATONEMENT),Emily Mortimer (currently in LARS AND THE REAL GIRL),Julia McKenzie and Stephen Campbell Moore as well as Americans staples Dan Aykroyd and Stockard Channing....and Fry lets them sizzle to a fizzle as these "bright young things" burn their candles at both ends and in the middle until some of them snuff out completely,lost in oblivion.Society dances on the edge in this film,and not since WILD PARTY or CHICAGO has a film so captured the reckless abandon of a generation.This is not a stodgey English Period Piece all corsetted and prim like Waugh's other famous "Brideshead Revisited" and "A Handful of Dust" (Both made into rather dreary films IMO).BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS is a brilliantly acted, all stops pulled out, nonsensical romp through the 1930's leading up to the Blitz.

The DVD extras are wonderfully informative including a small featurette filmed by "the runners" who worked on the film,giving the casual filmgoer a day to day look at the behind the scenes work and workers on films.The other featurette is a look at Fry and also includes a superb commentary.WORTH IT from a marvelous actor in his directorial debut.

Other films dedicated to "The Lost Generation" are WAITING FOR THE MOON,THE MODERNS,NORA,TOM AND VIV,SCOTT AND ZELDA,THE GREAT GATSBY, A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY and the Broadway play THE VIOLET HOUR.

Everyone who loves British wit and acerbic satire knows the writing of Evelyn Waugh and the acting and wit of Actor/Director Stephen Fry: the idea of Fry adapting Waugh's raucous campy vamp of England in the 1930s seems like the perfect fit. In many ways it is - in particulars, but alas not in the totality of the work that resulted in this vacuous film.

While the camera work is endlessly interesting, it does often upstage the point of the story. Or maybe that is part of the problem with this colorful film - its lack of point. BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS tackles the class structure of England in a bit heavily one-sided foray, leaving us with the feeling that all of England's young folk prior to WW II were party people with little else on their minds than garish flamboyant stupefying parties...and the importance of having money. Manipulation of the gentry, the willy-nilly ups and downs of serendipitous fortunes, and the self indulgent morals of the characters that populate this story seem to be Fry's gleaning of the Waugh text.

Not that this is a bad movie: this is as colorful, darkly witty study of the shallow life of the times and the dialogue is very funny and very cutting. The actors are all in that rare class of Britain's best: Jim Broadbent, Peter O'Toole, Emily Mortimer, Michael Sheen, Stephen Campbell Moore, David Tennant, Fenella Woolgar, Julia McKenzie, Simon Callow, John Mills (and even adding Stockard Channing!) all are entertaining but each manages to keep his character one dimensional.

I suppose there is a point to this, but though entertained by the film, the point of adapting Waugh's VILE BODIES into this bit of fluff remains nebulous at best. Grady Harp, February 2005

Evelyn Waugh's brand of satire and sentiment hasn't worn well with American audiences. Of all the screen adaptations of Waugh, and these include "A Handful of Dust," "Decline and Fall," "Scoop," and the "Sword of Honour" Trilogy, only the miniseries "Brideshead Revisited" (aimed at the PBS set) and the cameo-studded "The Loved One" (who could forget Rod Steiger's turn as Mr. Joyboy or Aylene Gibbons as his mother?) have managed to make an impression. "Bright Young Things," based on Waugh's "Vile Bodies," managed to disappear from American theatres before most of us registered its arrival, so I was compelled to wait for DVD. The wait was well worth it. This is a delightful realization of the novel, with several "bright young" faces (mostly newcomers) in the leads, and Stephen Fry in the director's chair. The hero in a Waugh novel never makes much of an impression, and the heroine is often bland to the point of being boring (plotting wasn't Waugh's long suit); however, Stephen Campbell Moore and Emily Mortimer are more than serviceable as Adam Fenwich-Symes and Nina Blount. The real fun in the films, as in the books, comes from the parade of eccentric minor characters, and, in these, we are not disappointed: Jim Broadbent and Julia McKenzie make an impression, as the Major and Adam's landlady, but the greatest fun lies in the casting of Peter O'Toole, as Nina's check-writing papa, and, of all people, John Mills, who's been playing addled old gentlemen (most happily in "The Wrong Box") for half a century, as a cocaine-snorting party guest. Dan Ackroyd and Stockard Channing are also along for the ride, perhaps as a sop to Americans who only recognize star power when it comes with an American accent. The story is of little consequence here (although the themes of censorship and religious excess have a contemporary ring), and there are some jarringly sober moments, including a young man's suicide, but the comedy wins out. Fry is to be congratulated, not least for his self-effacing turn as a chauffeur (who can fail to recognize the voice of Jeeves?), and his commentary on the film is one of the chief reasons to buy the DVD.

Evelyn Waugh's most characteristic novel VILE BODIES would seem almost impossibly difficult to adapt for film; Stephen Fry tries here, and achieves much, but doesn't quite pull it off. Some of the characters from Waugh's novel are captured perfectly (particularly the desperate gossip columnist the Earl Balcairn, played here with real pathos and energy by the wonderful James McAvoy, and the gloomy wife of a prime minister, played all too briefly by Imelda Staunton), but others fall very wide of Waugh's mark. Many of the actors seems to be trying too hard, which is absolutely not in the spirit of the original novel. Fry makes the wild 30s parties seem far too much like their analogues from his contemporary experience, and he dooms the screenplay by providing it with a false romantic ending that goes grossly against the grain of Waugh's novel.

Until it goes completely gooey at the end, Stephen Fry's "Bright Young Things" is an entertaining, stylish screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's corrosively funny novel, "Vile Bodies." Fry keeps the show moving at a fast clip; he makes the film visually stunning, varying the color schemes dazzlingly from scene to scene with the help of cinematographer Henry Braham and production designer Michael Howells; and if leads Stephen Campbell Moore and Emily Mortimer are a bit bland, Fry nevertheless obtains sparkling supporting performances from Peter O'Toole, Dan Aykroyd, Michael Sheen, and the ineffable Fenella Woolgar. (We even get a few glimpses of the venerable Sir John Mills snorting coke in a party scene.) Unfortunately, unlike Waugh, Fry runs smack into history, and it pretty much totals the last quarter of the movie. Waugh, writing in 1930, had the luxury of creating an unspecified war to end his novel; Fry pointed out in a recent interview that he had no choice but to end the movie with World War II, the war that actually occurred. That's true enough, but he didn't have to give the film a soppy, standard-issue happy ending that runs completely counter to Waugh, the 20th Century's closest equivalent to Jonathan Swift. (Fry actually clues us in early on that he's going to go soft on the material; he changes the name of Michael Sheen's character from the novel's Miles Malpractice--a name straight out of Richard Brinsley Sheridan--to Miles Maitland, thus trying to transform a satirical archetype into a sympathetic character.) Fry--a brilliant actor, writer and wit--makes his film directing debut here, and he shows enough talent to make us eager to see his followup project. But "Bright Young Things," though certainly worth seeing, is a wrongheaded disappointment in the end.

This is a stylish, satirical and thoughtful movie about people not worth thinking too much about. We're in London in the Thirties. The wealthy, bored young spawn of the upper crust flit from party to party, keeping the dawn at bay and amusing each other with their brittleness and wit. We're in the middle of high society, "that uneasy alliance of bright young things and old survivors."

Adam Fenwick-Symes (Stephen Campbell Moore) wants to be a writer, hasn't a penny, but whose friends are all among the "things." He loves Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer), a young woman who would rather be bored and rich than bored and poor. (She finally marries a very boring, aristocratic young man, Ginger Littlejohn, who is rich. "Oh, darling," she says to Adam, "if only you were as rich as Ginger...or even half as rich.")

Throughout the movie Adam finds himself in situations where he comes close to money and loses it, whether it's gambling in a hotel which has wonderfully loose morals to working as Mr. Chatterbox, a gossip columnist for a press lord. His friends are fun and stylish, but also shallow, condescending and oblivious to any feelings except their own. "You bloody people," one person finally says to them, "Who the bloody hell do you think you are?" As the Thirties pass into the 1939 invasion of Poland and Britain's declaration war, the parties stop. Bad things happen and real life takes over. But eventually Adam and Nina find their way together, without money.

I liked this movie a lot. It has great style and dialogue, and things keep moving. It was based on Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. The characters are superficial but after a while you get to know them. There are first-rate actors portraying these bright young things, including Michael Sheen as Miles, a wealthy young queen, and Fenella Woolgar as Agatha Runciple, a young woman without a reflective thought in her head. There are also wonderful performances by some well-known names in smaller parts: Jim Broadbent as an alcoholic colonel who shows up several times, Jim Carter as a filth-hating customs supervisor, Peter O'Toole as somewhat balmy aristocrat who isn't as eccentric as he appears, Simon Callow as the deposed king of Anatolia, and John Mills in a brief but funny bit as an old aristocrat at a party who mistakes a sniff of cocaine for a sniff of snuff.

The DVD picture and audio are first-rate.