Bright Young Things (2003)

Stephen Fry's directorial debut is a second-rate attempt at updating Evelyn Waugh's novel. To make the film more 'accessible' Fry pretends to be Baz Luhrmann - and fails. Bright Young Things has possibly the noisiest and most unrelenting soundtrack of the year, with so much cutting between shots that I began to feel that I had whiplash. This is an exercise style over content, but the style really isn't much to write home about.

Bright Young Things is one of those wretched literary adaptations where the writer/director is desperate to say "oh, it might be a period piece, but how little things have changed". And Fry takes every opportunity to underline this point. Over and over and over again. Watching Sir John Mills's character snorting coke (actually it wasn't really a character, more of a cypher or stereotype like virtually all the other roles here) was one of the more embarrassing screen moments of 2003.

The film has no sense of narrative drive or pace. It's difficult to either follow or care. Unfortunately newcomer Stephen Campbell Moore who is as close as the film gets to a main protagonist is a dull, uncharismatic actor. Michael Sheen overacts and looks embarrassed in a ridiculous role. However there are star turns from Fenella Woolgar and James McAvoy who manage to rivet even when everything else is flailing around them.

Fatally, the film has absolutely no sense of period whatsoever and seems littered with borrowings from across the 20th century. Waugh's novel was about the Jazz Age of the 1920s. Fry's world is a kind of incorrectly jazzy 30s, with added 21st century haircuts. The final scenes set during the Second World War seem lame and are, of course, simply wrong - the novel was written in 1930.

The film is ill-conceived and poorly executed. I had always assumed that Stephen Fry would be the right man to adapt Waugh, but here he proves that he doesn't have the least idea what makes good cinema, let alone a convincing adaptation.

Fmovies: As one of the best assets humanity can boast to count among itself, Stephen Fry has delighted the world across a vast array of media, firmly establishing himself as one of my very favourite entertainers. How then, you ask, could it have taken me so unforgivably long to sample his Bright Young Things?

Having just penned the novel from which the film takes its name, Adam Symes is crestfallen to have it taken from him by customs as contraband literature. He returns to his life of yuppie indulgence (if indeed the film's '30s/'40s setting will permit the usage of that term) where he is variously delighted and disappointed by the tide-like fortunes of his financial situation, and the uncertainty concerning his ability to wed his beloved Nina.

Beginning with an expository reporter attempting to gain access to a lascivious and drug fuelled party, Bright Young Things launches us into the wild party lifestyle of its central cast of characters. The cocaine and absinthe combinations proclaimed by Nina as boring impress upon us the extent of the inter-war indulgence of the London youth. Things are somewhat slow to start, though the positively delightful and flowery banter of Fry's script keeps us both amused and entranced by the language of the era. Humour comes spouting from the supporting cast: the likes of Fenella Woolgar and Michael Sheen lend more laughs than the main acts themselves, who are generally left to present the dramatic front of the movie. Without doubt the film's best factor is the scene in which the hopeful Symes visits his father-in-law-to-be, a crackpot lunatic played splendidly by Peter O' Toole. As the running time finds itself elapsed, the drama begins to more firmly announce its presence to us, the stakes yet again raised and the outcome looking ever more bleak. The problem is that this never reaches a sufficient and acceptable zenith. No point of conclusion is reached wherein the characters seem to transform beyond the horrid snobs they began life before our eyes as, a shame given the potential this may have had. Not, that is to say, that the characters are unlikeable. In spite of their vices they grow upon us and become endeared to us, though we look on like disappointed parents, hopefully awaiting the time when they will learn the folly of their ways and grow up, a time the film never presents, or at least not expressly enough. I understand the novel on which the film is based takes this more desired route, the film's distance from this perhaps the product of Fry's wishes to carve his own story. In any case, despite the slight disappointment of the lack of redemption, the film is consistent in its humorous and dramatic elements, which blend together to give a decent slice of entertainment.

Almost certainly less good than it could and should have been, Bright Young Things feels like it fell at the last hurdle. That said, it was never at the front of the race. A perfectly competent debut from Mr Fry, one cannot disagree that the film holds its own.

A most notable characteristic of this film is that it rather zanily merges the 1920's with the 1930's. That historical distortion may seem a slight defect to some viewers choosing to concentrate on a broader stage involving the upper class in its last throes of excess, but for me it destroys the underlying plot. The years before the Great Depression -- the Roaring 20's -- were sui generis. Moving everything forward to events as late as 1940 is a forced element that simply fails.

Otherwise, there are some bright young moments here. Character actors do indeed steal the show, even if some are given throw-away roles. If only there were better and more believable development of various interactions between the leads, it would make for compelling drama; but we are treated instead to campy olio resolving itself into a strange conclusion, somewhat surreal. For example, the business between Adam and Ginger having to do with money as WWII rages on is misplaced farce -- even if the audience assumes a generous disposition of credulity.

Little wonder outsiders looking in have a difficult time with this film, not to mention us history buffs.

Bright Young Things fmovies. "Bright Young Things" is a comedy that's never funny, a period piece that doesn't know what period it's in, and a party film that leaves you with the hangover.

When writer-director Stephen Fry decided to make an adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh novel, he could have done himself a favor and not adapted "Vile Bodies." It's an episodic satire on the lives of a group of London club kids in the late 1920s that attempts to elicit laughter from the nasty ways they are run to ground by the world around them. The characters aren't meant for any deeper emotional investment than lab rats, though Fry seems to believe otherwise.

At the center of the story, in both novel and film, is young Adam (Stephen Campbell Moore), who at the start of our story has lost his prized manuscript and is desperately trying to find new sources of funding with which to marry his lover Nina (Emily Mortimer). Opportunity comes in the form of an offer from publisher Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd) who wants Adam's help "tearing the lid off the young, idle, and rich."

"I put Seignior Mussolini on the front page, no one buys a copy," he laments. "But a picture of one of your set in a nightclub, I can't print enough copies."

The problem with both the novel and the film is this interesting idea is dropped almost before it begins, in favor of a number of other outrageous episodes which seem to act on the principle that anything can be made merry provided it moves fast enough. Like a strange major who makes off with some money Adam wanted to bet on a long-shot horse. Or a party that winds up finding themselves in the Prime Minister's residence. Or a car race that loses a wayward driver. All of this is drawn out as if it were funny merely by being incongruous.

The film is worse on a few counts. First, Fry by necessity condenses the story but is at pains to include almost every character that appears in the book, as a way of facilitating assorted cameos that run from extraneous (Richard E. Grant as an angry Jesuit) to sad (John Mills as a mute coke sniffer). Second, he invests his version with an elegiac sadness that feels totally out of place in the second half. Nothing says comedy like a man sticking his head in an oven, or another tearfully discovering his homosexual lifestyle exposed.

Even the main romance, a matter of crass opportunism in the book, is presented as a kind of real love story, even heroic as the Roaring '20s zip suddenly ahead to Dunkirk and the Blitz. Fry doesn't seem to trust either Waugh's wit or his own to make "Bright Young Things" work on comedic grounds, or else he really thinks the characters worth celebrating. The result is a doubled-down waste of our time.

Having seen this film at the cinema and thoroughly enjoyed it I purchased it on DVD and then read the book so as to better judge whether the comments that the film was an exceedingly loose adaptation were true. It is certainly true that Fry hasn't stuck to the narrative strictly but the changes he made in the name of good cinema were overwhelmingly the right ones and he actually managed to bring forward some entertaining background characters and relegate some fairly tedious ones. For example Lord Monomark who is a Canadian Newspaper magnate shamelessly based on Lord Beverbrook is rairly mentioned in the book but is superbly played by Dan Ackroyd in the film whilst the PM Walter Outrage who features heavily in Waughs novel is barely mentioned in the film and rightly so as the character in the novel is a complicated amalgamation of contemporary politics (i.e Ramsay Mcdonald and Bonar Law)that even I having studied the period extensively found heavy going. Also whilst the ending is contrived to be too happy it is a marginal improvement on the novel in my opinion which doesn't seem to conclude the book very well. Overall a superb film with excellent production values and peerless period feel for which Stephen Fry should be commended. I just hope that he has a stab at at adapting Decline and Fall which is another excellent Waugh novel.

The film Bright Young Things, adapted from Evelyne Waugh's acclaimed fable; Vile Bodies is manic in its pace. As such it is reminiscent of His Girl Friday (1940) with its legendary speed of comedy delivery. The difference with His Girl Friday the speed of the comedy delivery is applied to loquaciousness with a bit of slap stick. Director Stephen Fry of Bright Young Things on the other hand utilises speed to articulate the decadence of the period. As such he is affective in his endeavour of making his point of a decadent aristocracy.

The depressing aspect of the film is that the aristocracy are portrayed as decadent party animals, unlike the poor who in their pursuit of escaping their worries are (in today's post modern Britain) often labelled as 'feckless' by the tabloid press. But as the impoverished poor struggled to feed themselves across Europe during the inter-war period, the aristocracy idly carried on without social conscience or obligation to responsibility. Such decadence at the expense of the poor contributed towards the rise of extreme politics in Europe during the 1920s.

Contributing to the masses' public perception of the idle rich decadence of the inter-war period was the tabloid press. The press baron in the film is shown as suppressing the realities of the issues affecting the ordinary people of Britain for profit, and thereby concealing truth.

While Fry adeptly captures the decadence of the 20s in Bright Young Things, Peter O'Toole steels the film with his outstanding satirising of the stereotypical English eccentric. As the eccentric of the upper classes O'Toole's character Colnol Blout is the epitome of English two faced diplomacy of the ruling classes. The example being when he writes a cheque out for £1000 to help his prospective son-in-law to marry his daughter, when he signs it in the name of Charlie Chaplin. A typical English snub no less!

Excellent film, well acted and brilliantly directed.