User Reviews

Watching Stephen Fry making his directorial debut is a little bit like watching a toddler the first time he rides a bike without stabilisers. Things are dangerously wobbly to begin with then smooth out nicely as self-belief grows before everything comes crashing down due to over-confidence.

Based on Evelyn Waugh's 'Vile Bodies', this film chronicles the debauched lifestyle of a group of paradoxically penniless rich kids (i.e. they're mostly lords and ladies but have no visible means of income) in a Britain of the 30s that would be unrecognisable to all but the impoverished aristocracy. This is a rarefied world that no doubt existed and seemed real to the likes of Waugh but which is unrecognisable to the majority of British people. Without doubt, however, this movie, in its representation of that period and lifestyle, provides us with an absorbing and entertaining tale.

Apart from our hero Adam Fenwick-Symes (Stephen Campbell Moore, another débutant giving a good account of himself) the characters in this film aren't so much introduced as wander in like party guests you drunkenly met in another room ten minutes ago. They all share a propensity for decadence, and the affectation of declaring most everything to be a frantic bore, and are all, without exception, empty shells. We've seen it all before in the likes of Brideshead Revisited and The Sun Also Rises, but Fry manages to keep us hooked despite the clumsy manner in which he films those opening scenes. Perhaps it's because of the sumptuous production design that captures the feel of these bright young things' hedonistic lifestyle, or perhaps it's because of the amiably random manner in which Fry begins to pull the threads of his story together. Either way, despite Fry's apparent determination to use every scene transition known to the film world, and to make use of at least a little snippet from each of a multitude of cameras used to shoot many scenes, the story manages to hold your attention and drag you along with it, leaving you asking yourself why you're interested in a bunch of characters who are all about as deep as lemon peel.

The story and the characters follow a predictable arc, but Fry fills the film with enough detail and ingenuity to at least keep us entertained. A host of famous faces provide a series of cameos that last little more than seconds in some cases – and this is without doubt the only film in which you will see the redoubtable Sir John Mills snorting cocaine. Fenella Woolgar outshines everybody in her scenes as the agreeably dippy cokehead Agatha, who brings a whole new meaning to the term 'powdering one's nose' and eventually parties herself into an insane asylum. In a role that strays into parody every now and then, she manages to provide a brief glimpse of a lost soul behind the party face, and her 'dream' speech pretty much sums up the entire social scene in which the characters are embroiled. James McAvoy, as the ill-fated Lord Balcairn (AKA Mr. Chatterbox) also stands out in one of few sympathetic roles.

The film loses its momentum in the final act, when Fry moves from adapting Waugh's story to altering it completely, and we are left with an ending that is not only contrived but stretches credibility beyond its limits. Having managed to have steered a path that at least avoided conventionality in terms of plot, Fry suddenly makes a complete about-turn and presents us with a finale that stands out as a monumental piece of misjudgement. Perhaps Waugh's ending was too downbeat for the backers. It's a shame if that is the case, because it will mean that Fry most likely compromised himself. Somewhere down the line someone needs to show an ounce of integrity and fight for an ending that is true to the nature of the story, rather than compromising with a soap-opera climax that tarnishes the good work that has gone before.

Bottom line: BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS is a worthy directorial debut from Stephen Fry and, while it's no classic, has a lot going for it. It's probably not worth seeking out, but if it happens to cross your path it's definitely worth watching. Just be sure to stop watching after the war scenes….

I have not read Waugh in years, and while this adaptation made me recall how much I enjoyed "Vile Bodies," the film does not do justice to the novel. The film is muddled and episodic, and requires the audience to do too much work. There is none of the subtlety here of a Woody Allen, for example, to reward us for remaining engaged amid the sloppy editing and choppy pacing. In fact, the excellent cast seems wasted, as does the novel itself. The movie brightens up during fleeting and sparkling party scenes that make us feel we are in London at a certain time -- though it's not clear what time that is. This adaptation pushes the hedonism of the 20s forward to the 30s (I believe the novel was published around 1930, whereas the movie seems to be set in the 30s). And the jazz score only reminded me what a cultural backwater London was at this time, relative to New York, where the Jazz Age and the real parties were in full swing. So, it doesn't work as a character-driven drama, and it's not a compelling portrait of the age. It is, however, perhaps worth seeing for some performances. We do not see enough of James McAvoy and Alec Newman, who are excellent. What a strange coincidence that both of these actors played the leads in the SciFi Channel's mini-series adaptations of the Dune novels.

"Bright Young Things" or "Bright Young People" was the name given to a set of hedonistic, fun-loving young aristocrats and bohemians in the London of the 1920s and 1930s and who featured prominently in the gossip columns of the day. When in 1930 Evelyn Waugh wrote a novel satirising the group he initially intended to call it "Bright Young Things", but rejected this because he felt it had become too much of a journalistic cliché. His eventual choice of title, however, "Vile Bodies", was not his happiest inspiration, so it is perhaps not surprising that writer-director Stephen Fry reverted to Waugh's original choice.

The novel contains some brilliant satirical writing and social commentary, but its plot is rather unsatisfactory. It is also notably uneven in tone, starting off relatively light-hearted but becoming progressively bitterer and gloomier; Waugh himself attributed this unevenness to the fact that it was while writing the novel that his marriage to his first wife (also named Evelyn) collapsed. Waugh's story ends with the outbreak of a catastrophic European war; writing three years before Hitler's rise to power, he was remarkably prophetic in this respect.

Fry rewrites Waugh's story somewhat, moving the action from the late twenties/early thirties to the late thirties; there are references to both Hitler and Wallis Simpson. The Prime Minister, however, is neither Baldwin nor Chamberlain but Waugh's fictitious James Brown. (In choosing this name he also proved unintentionally prophetic; Gordon Brown's full name was James Gordon Brown). The film ends during the actual, historical Second World War, not the hypothetical war of the novel. Fry is able to deal more explicitly with matters such as drug use and homosexuality, which in the moral climate of the early thirties Waugh could only hint at.

The plot is really too complex to summarise in any detail, but it revolves around the efforts of an aspiring young novelist named Adam Fenwick-Symes to find enough money to court his fiancée Nina Blount. When the manuscript of Adam's latest novel, also titled "Bright Young Things", is confiscated by Dover customs officers for allegedly being pornographic, even though they have never read it, he is forced to take a job as a gossip columnist on a newspaper, a job which brings him into frequent contact with London's smart set. Other important characters include Simon Balcairn, Adam's predecessor as "Mr Chatterbox", Ginger Littlejohn, Adam's rival for Nina's affections, and the Canadian-born newspaper proprietor Lord Monomark. (Monomark, like Lord Copper in Waugh's later novel "Scoop", is a satirical portrait of Lord Beaverbrook).

The film contains a large number of cameos by distinguished members of the British acting profession, among them John Mills in his last film before his death two years later. Among the notable contributions are those from Dan Aykroyd as the overbearing Monomark, Fenella Woolgar as the madcap socialite Agatha Runcible, Michael Sheen as the screamingly camp Miles Malpractice, Peter O'Toole as Nina's mad old father Colonel Blount and Simon Callow as the exiled King of Anatolia, forever bewailing the theft of a valuable fountain-pen, something which seems to distress him far more than the loss of his kingdom.

Fry keeps some of the serious incidents from the original novel; one character, for example, commits suicide and another ends up in a lunatic asylum, but he gives his film a much happier ending. This may prove controversial with purists, but in my view it was the right thing to do. Waugh's bleak ending served to underline his serious satirical purpose, but satire tends to lose its bite when directed against the mores and social institutions of several decades ago rather than against those of one's own day. "Bright Young Things" is less a social satire than a comedy-drama with a period setting, and, with some witty dialogue, amusing incidents and well-drawn characters it works very well as such. 7/10

Having read a part in Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One" in college it's nice to recognize the sharp bite of the curmudgeonly Waugh wit in this latter-day film adaptation of his "Vile Bodies." This romp through the partying smart set of 1930s Britain's from the viewpoint of a budding young writer co-opted by a broadly drawn caricature of Lord Beaverbrook (played by Dan Aykroyd, type-cast for once as a loud Canadian) into the world of sensational yellow gossip journalism is wonderful.

The more obtund contemporary film adaptations of Waugh made in murky black and white converge on this almost Platonic ideal of a movie based on a Waugh story. The cinematography's splendid, the performances crisp and the pace taut. Emily Mortimer is properly reptilian as the desirable, shallow and fickle love-object Nina Blount, Stephen Campbell Moore earnest and sympathetic as striving and ineptly conniving Adam Fenwick-Symes, the cast in general bring Waugh's vision of the wicked, vapid high society scene of the 1930s to life adroitly.

Dan Aykroyd revels in the Beaverbrook-based character whaling away at the levers of power, David Tennant (the current incarnation of Doctor Who at this writing) is great as the obtuse but wealthy "Ginger", Peter O'Toole does a nice cameo as Nina's father, and the peripatetic Jim Broadbent puts in yeoman service.

Stockard Channing excels as a sociopathic rich American (every Waugh story has at least one). Her character, "Mrs. Melrose Ape," is an Aimee Semple MacPherson-type idiotic fundamentalist hypocrite touring wicked, pre-war Europe with a troupe of holy young girl singers, putting the Word of God to hokey rhyme. The words of the song "Ain't No Flies on the Lamb of God" may have been written by director Stephen Fry, but they are wicked satire in the Waughian spirit.

The vignettes of party life play nasty, amusing havoc with the social elite of pre-war Britain - well-placed clergymen sniff diffidently at cocaine and drink authoritatively, while His Majesty's statesmen are set adrift after their wives and daughters work their ruin in completely unnecessary scandals created at lascivious parties.

Tales of what goes on when the high and the mighty party hard gives the simmering anger of British veterans and working people a palpable focus and outlet - news of those vile bodies sporting about on unearned money and in the arms of powerful sinners is central to the plot; the main character is just one of three people who work their own ruin while writing about the dissolution of others for publisher Dan Aykroyd's newspaper empire.

Some folks here in IMDb remark about the characters not being as sympathetic as they had hoped. This betrays a lack of experience with the writing of Evelyn Waugh, who wrote caricatures, not characters.

Waugh's savage wit spares few of the people who populate his stories; Waugh is the anti-romantic Jack the Ripper, the Siva the Destroyer of British high society's pretensions, down to the scene in which Adam Fenwick-Symes and "Ginger" dicker over how much Nina Blount's affection is worth in pounds, shillings and pence (after all, Symes's inn bill had to be paid).

Waugh based one of his most hateful villains ("The Man Who Liked Dickens") on his own father - a very recognizable portrait of a venal and worthless old bastard that stunned those who knew Waugh (perhaps it stunned those who knew Waugh well less than it did the others... ).

This is perhaps the least acerbic of Waugh's stories. Stephen Fry works magic in bringing it to vibrant, entertaining life. It's Waugh for those who can't cope with Waugh's usual demolition of every character in his stories. If you've never seen a movie based on a Waugh story before, maybe this is a good start to his work.

I saw this movie because I'm a fan of Stephen Fry from back in his "Blackadder" days, and I was reading an article about James McAvoy which mentioned his doing this film with Fry. I have to say that even though the film didn't make me think any less of either man as an artist, it was somewhat underwhelming overall, particularly in the last 20 minutes or so. I was very amused by the "Old Major" character for most of the film but finding him in the war situation didn't resonate for me. The biggest problem I had was with Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer). I couldn't be sure if I was supposed to respect that character or not, and by the time the film seemed to come down one way I had already made up my mind for the opposite. When Adam (Stephen Campbell Moore) sold her for his rent money, I thought it was actually a pretty sensible move considering how shallow she is, and I didn't understand – or believe – that he would give up his fortune for her much less burn his book for no real reason. In general I didn't think the film earned the kind of sincerity and pathos that the director Fry attempts to draw on for that finale (and I wasn't surprised, after writing this and reading some other comments, to find it was imported into the book).

However, the more breezy aspects of the movie do work, and I also enjoyed the parts with McAvoy toward the beginning. His performance is really thrilling – the way he makes you feel at the same time how pathetically limited his ambitions are and yet believe his sincerity when he announces that he'll kill himself if he's not invited to a particular soirée. I laughed at the scene with him and Richard E. Grant (as a religious figure) and I felt bad for him when he made good on his promise. If only the movie had been about his character instead of this other guy who felt too serious to fit into that social group. There's a dual aspect to his screen persona, a mixture of a kind of misguided or disproportionate hunger for excitement and a vulnerability to intimate personal relationships that produces a feeling of awkward sensitivity just beneath the surface of a boor.

Fenella Woolgar is an actress I'd not heard of, but her work in this film was the most impressive of all. I've actually known people a bit like her back in college. I recognized pretty much all of the basic types presented in the film, but she made hers feel the most human and real which is an accomplishment considering the characters are deliberately shallow. What happens to her happy-go-lucky character made me reflect on the fact that she could have been somewhat insane all along and nobody would've noticed. Without getting too personal this also reminds me of some people I've known and some times I've lived in. Sometimes with the irrational things we do as kids or young adults either on a spur of the moment impulse or to try to impress each other, we get so wound up and confused that we can't even recognize who among our loved friends is just wild and crazy with youth and who might be alcoholic or mentally sick until it's too late. At least I never could.

The leading man and lady aren't nearly as impressive. Moore does pretty well at least until those war scenes, but I never cared for the character Mortimer was playing so it's hard to say how good she was in the movie. I never felt any kind of humanity from her, and I think the writer/director wanted us to, so at least some of the blame falls on her shoulders. Dan Akyroid is suitable, nothing special, and O'Toole's brief appearance grabs our attention but does nothing with it.

All in all, it's a moderately successful and watchable film, but I don't plan on returning to it anytime soon. I think the film takes itself a bit more seriously than it should.