Here's ROBBIE's review of Stephen Fry's screen adaptation of Vile Bodies. I haven't seen the movie and so can't comment directly, but it does look as though the screenwriters have made some alarming changes to the final chapters.
"[Fry] has changed the title, to compensate for the American market, to Bright Young Things. It begins well, with a very busy party done in a exuberant, Scorsese-ish manner. It never really recovers its energy after that. The story follows Adam Fenwick Symes, an upper class twit moving around Mayfair through a succesion of parties and outrageous incidents.
On the page, Waugh's comic universe delights and outrages the reader. This could have been achieved in a film but, and this is by no means an axiom for adaptations, you have to do it Waugh's way and Fry does it Waugh's when it suits him, and then does it his own way, or his producer's way, when it suits him; the result sinks the film.
Instead of being relentlessly Waugh-like, the film starts trying to give Fenwick-Symes and his martini swilling, coke snorting friends a sort of emotional gravity more suited to the soaring strings of American television. When Agatha Runcible goes bonkers and is in a mental home, we are clearly supposed to feel sorry for her, but we don't, nor do we feel sorry for Miles Metroland being grassed up as a homosexual by his racing driver boyfriend and having 'to leave the country'. You have to be merciless in adapting Waugh--if you feel there is any point to adapting Waugh, which I don't. Most of the books are some kind of masterpieces and a masterpiece is something that's reached its final form. There are many exceptions to this of course and the producers of this film obviously believed that their multiplex punters cannot handle pure unadulterated Waugh, though I reckon they might. I heard on the net that there is a script being written of Brideshead where Julia and Ryder *stay together* at the end... They don't understand Waugh much eh?
Fry obviously has an agenda and wants to draw parallels with today. The relationship between the media and celebrities (the gossip column thread of the plot) and the media's irresponsibilty are clearly of especial interest to him; his sympathies firmly on the side of those being written about.
It's watchable but any Waugh fan's patience will fizzle out completely in the last ten or so minutes. Because Fry has altered the ending. The film and the its source are firmly based in in the London of the late 20s. What a surprise to find Adam Fenwick-Symes walking into Lottie's hotel and finding her guests gathered round the wireless listening to Chamberlain's broadcast announcing war with Germany.
Then much war stuff (nice turn from Jim Broadbent as the Major) with Fenwick-Symes coming back to blitzed London and being reunited with his silly bitch of a fiance and seeing off her once rich, now spiv husband. This coda is a ghastly miscalculation.
The saddest part of the whole production, for me, was seeing John Mills in it. At first I was pleased. I'm a fan of Millsy, as I call him. But his 40 seconds-long role had no dialogue; he merely sat in a party greedily snorting cocaine. As an image it spoke volumes to me."
Posted by Alan Allport at May 7, 2004 05:48 AMI've managed to save up roughly $28836 in my bank account, but I'm not sure if I should buy a house or not. Do you think the market is stable or do you think that home prices will decrease by a lot?
Posted by: Courtney Gidts at February 16, 2006 04:41 AM