Bright Young Things is the sort of movie that makes critics say it's as relevant now as it was when published. On the one hand, irony, the literary genre that measures the distance between the ideal and the real, is always "relevant," given man's moral imperfectibility. On the other hand, Vile Bodies wasn't especially predictive of the English "near future." No one can say the English didn't pull their socks up and defend the better cause in World War II. Not only that, the soldiers would have been a decade or so junior to Waugh, which is something no satirist expects, that the younger generation will have strengths and virtues his own lacks.
Fry has asked for this kind of comment by eliciting contemporary concern over tabloid news and paparazzi and commercial violations of privacy. This kind of banality is nearly the reverse of Waugh's suavity and misplaced to boot, since the problem to Waugh is not that the characters are caught out by the press but that they're doing what they're doing in the first place. But as an aesthetic matter it's worse that when the movie makes Waugh's naughty figurines redeemable they cease to be interesting. This is nearly inevitable because the script hasn't changed the story enough to support its romantic warping of a plot originally carpentered as satire.
All told, Bright Young Things is one of the most depressing obliterations of a literary source that comes to mind, much worse than the recent Wings of the Dove (1997) and Nicholas Nickleby (2002). It harks back to a fundamentally compromised Hollywood studio production like Madame Bovary (1949), a movie that similarly fails to appreciate, or even perceive, its source author's ironic outlook.
I'm a slow reader and I tore through Waugh's 321-page book at cheetah speed. If you add travel time, dinner, and the now-endless advertisements and previews before the 106-minute movie, you could stay home, read the whole book, and still get to bed earlier. The pleasures supplied by the comic acting of Jim Broadbent, Fenella Woolgar, Imelda Staunton, and Peter O'Toole are considerable but too incidental to rate a recommendation. There's no reason to see the movie.
A footnote about fallen behavior: lest anyone think that Waugh wrote from a morally unattainable height, look for the bananas in this review of a memoir by his son Auberon.
You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.
Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.
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