During last year’s European summer, the blazing heat in France carried off thousands of old people, among them 93-year-old expatriate Diana Mosley, widow of Sir Oswald, notorious Hitler intimate, co-dedicatee of Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies and the last surviving link with the pre-war ”bright young things” generation. As fortune would have it, Waugh’s centenary last year revived their memory almost at once. And Stephen Fry’s breathless, headlong adaptation of Vile Bodies as Bright Young Things gleefully cranks up all the wickedness and naughtiness, pedantically making his camera spin at their wild parties to show what a gorgeously decadent whirl it all was. The languor of the Oxford smart set in Charles Sturridge’s Brideshead Revisited adaptation was at 33RPM, or even 16RPM. Fry gives it to us at 78, with no sobbing oboes.
There are cuts and conflations and clever interpolations. But it’s a shame Fry lost the film crew in Colonel Blount’s garden and Waugh’s clever mocking of the embryonic British film industry. (Given Fry’s trials at the hands of his co-producers, The Film Consortium, perhaps it was all too painful.) Homosexuality, drolly unpunished in the novel, now leads to a fully-fledged Wildean bunk to Paris. Drugs, only glancingly alluded to in print, are here so prevalent that everyone is up to their hips in ”naughty salt”. But despite perfunctorily explicit new political allusions — Von Ribbentrop and Hitler are both mentioned — much of the satire and the darkness have disappeared and there are signs that test-screening executives have forced on Fry a saccharine ending. There’s no real hangover here, just a cocktail that’s more Virgin Mary than Bloody Mary.
The young principals are mostly unfamiliar faces. Stephen Campbell Moore plays Adam Symes, the personable chap whose autobiography is confiscated by philistine customs officers at Dover. Penniless, he can’t marry his fiancée Nina. She is played by Emily Mortimer, who grows in stature with every screen outing. Living on tick, Adam sees nothing for it but to hop back aboard the carousel of fashionable metropolitan parties, while the chippy envy-mongers of the press look on with fascinated horror.
He whiles away his time with fashionable A-listers like queeny Miles Malpractice (Michael Sheen) and the Honorable Agatha Runcible, very well played by Fenella Woolgar, the only person in the cast who really does look and sound like someone from the 1930s; she presents to the camera a face that is somehow very clever and very stupid simultaneously.
The older generation is played by a veritable casting directory of well-loved performers. Peter O’Toole is Nina’s eccentric daddy, Colonel Blount, and he really does look quite mad. Simon Callow is the deposed Ruritanian king, to whom Fry’s script sweetly restores his beloved gold fountain pen. Jim Broadbent is on grand form as the drunk major who takes Adam’s money, and Dan Aykroyd is terrific as the Beaverbrookesque Lord Monomark, who makes Adam his newspaper’s gossip writer.
It all ends with the coming of war, so Fry understandably has his cast listening to Nevile Chamberlain on the radio, though Waugh actually imagined this in 1930; the book’s ending had therefore a dystopian quality whose eerily prescient brilliance a movie version can only dumbly absorb.
Fry has adroitly managed a vast group portrait of cameos and elegant little turns, but none of them is on screen long enough to make much of an impression and nothing quite coheres into a story. An emotional big finish is not entirely convincing in this brittle, affectless, black-comic universe. In the end, this amusing and briskly genial picture reminded me of a telly serial. The 1930s stylings were just that — stylings and nothing more. — Â