Americans, who have become the most self-questioning of all triumphant peoples, have grown familiar since the 1970s with ironic epic in our movies. For instance, Francis Ford Coppola's first two Godfather movies (1972, 1974) show the establishment of a Sicilian-American dynasty on new shores, as if in continuation of the Aeneid. The characters at the center of the action where the heroes would be in the ancient poem, however, are brutal criminals. The baptism sequence at the end of the first picture, in which the crown "prince" Michael stands godfather to his nephew while his henchmen murder his rivals with paramilitary precision, manifests not the sanction of the gods but the empty formality of Michael's religious commitment. It certainly isn't sin-cleansing blood that's flowing.
Robert Altman's Nashville (1975) is perhaps the closest thing to Waugh's Vile Bodies in movies: both wickedly satirize enclosed societies in a way that radiates beyond them. Set in the country music industry, Nashville is a casually structured pageant of the comings and goings, the ups and downs, the ambitions, ruminations, and dalliances, of 26 characters--"royalty," courtiers, suppliants, all of them more or less ridiculous or compromised--who converge at a concert in support of a self-appointed savior of a presidential candidate. On Sunday morning we get a cross-section of the church services they attend, with apparent sincerity, but their lives are caught up in a kitsch mixture of art, religion, and politics that seems to satisfy no one deeply. Nashville ends with an assassination at the city's replica of the Parthenon and the final shot is a pan up to the empty sky, putting in place epic monumentalism and undermining it at the same time. (Nashville is much closer to Vile Bodies than Altman's Gosford Park (2001), a satiric murder mystery that "achieves" an almost Soviet degree of humorlessness about British class relations.)
This does not mean, unfortunately, that filming Vile Bodies is a sure thing. The actor Stephen Fry (A Handful of Dust (1988), Peter's Friends (1992), Wilde (1997), Gosford Park (2001)) has made his directorial debut with an adaptation of it and the kindest thing I can say is that the new title Bright Young Things, a phrase drawn from the book, is better than the original. Vile Bodies suits a collection of Jonathan Swift's poems (e.g., "The Lady's Dressing Room" which makes you gag til you laugh); Waugh's disgust just isn't that carnal. (After sleeping with Adam Nina says, "All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.")
Adam's volume of Purgatorio has been dropped, but the movie opens at an Inferno-themed party, hinting at a spiritual-visionary quality that, alas, it otherwise misses entirely. Beneath its chic surface the non-stop partying in Vile Bodies is supposed to be as ghastly as in Poe's Masque of the Red Death, but Fry's handling of the breathless opening bash is too explicit. If any director does have the touch to get a memorable laugh from a flapper saying how bored she is while flapping, it isn't Fry. From the start everything that's understated in Waugh becomes overstated in the movie, which you could forgive if it helped people who haven't read the book get the jokes. But that's just the start of the movie's problems. The culmination of them is that Fry either doesn't understand the total irony of Waugh's view in Vile Bodies or deliberately chose to violate it in order to make the movie more palatably movieish.
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