IT’S Brideshead Revisited, but not as we remember it. A new film version of Evelyn Waugh’s elegiac 1945 novel has been criticised on its release in America this weekend for taking the title in vain.

When a 13-hour drama series based on the book appeared on television 27 years ago, audiences were beguiled by the opulence of aristocratic life in prewar England while women swooned at Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in their flannel trousers.

The movie revisits the plot - and Castle Howard in York, where the series was also filmed - in just two hours.

Cinema buffs have pointed out that at least three hours of the television series were occupied with lovingly filmed shots of trains chugging through the countryside, Bentleys pulling up outside stately piles and dandies strolling on manicured lawns before tucking into strawberry and champagne picnics.

Now critics have had their say. The Washington Post said that it “does not hold up the integrity of the book” while The New York Times labelled it “a lazy, complacent film which takes the novel’s name in vain”. The Boston Herald called it “oddly pointless”.

New Yorkers leaving the cinema on Friday night said it was “not riveting”.

Not all the reviews were as damning. Roger Ebert, the highly regarded Chicago film critic, described it as “a good, sound example of the British period drama” while Variety called it “a finely wrought, Merchant-Ivory style, Brit-lit film, which is lush and compelling”.

In fact the movie, co-written by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, whose credits include The Last King of Scotland, deliberately took that route. The Merchant-Ivory films, such as Howards End and The Remains of the Day, were big sweep movies which examined the heart of English society.

It is no coincidence that Emma Thompson, who was in Howards End and Remains of the Day, is Lady Marchmain, the keeper of the Catholic flame within her family. Posters of Thompson as Marchmain are being used to promote the film in America.

Her role is not nearly as large, though, as those of her children, Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) and Julia (Hayley Atwell), or that of Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), the middle-class painter who falls in love with both of them. These three are hardly known in the United States and are not that recognisable in Britain. In the ITV version, Irons played Ryder while Andrews was the sad and dissolute Sebastian.

The film has also been criticised for straying from the novel by having Julia accompany Charles to Venice where they kiss. There is no such passion in the book or ITV series.

Michael Gambon plays Lord Marchmain, a role which provided Laurence Olivier with a dramatic deathbed speech in the television adaptation.

A film version of such a highly praised television series would always be a risk. But, according to Kevin Loader, the producer, there is such a length of time between 1981 and 2008 that many people will either not be aware of Granada’s drama or will have forgotten it. Whishaw, who has received rave stage reviews recently for Hamlet and The Seagull, has never seen the ITV drama.

Both Loader and Davies, best known for his television adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House, point out that the film’s source material is very much the Waugh book. But there is not as much of Oxford in the film, directed by Julian Jarrold, who last year made Becoming Jane (his take on the early Jane Austen).

John Mortimer, who wrote the original script for the ITV series, had himself been a student at Oxford and was very influenced by his time there.

The television version also had a significant role, as did the book, for Aloysius, Sebastian’s teddy bear. Davies removed the bear completely from his script. But Brock reinserted Aloysius, even though the bear makes just two cameo appearances.

The issue to cause most anguish among the film-makers was the book’s religious theme. “Mine was an antiCatholic version,” said Davies.

This probably explains why Brock was brought in since Waugh had clearly written a book where Catholicism is key even if questioned.

There is also the issue of whether Charles, turned down by Julia because he is not a Catholic, is about to convert by the end of the book.

Davies’s script had Charles returning to Brideshead at the end of the war and going into its chapel where he extinguishes the candle flame. This was Davies’s personal antireligious take. The finished version has Charles observing the burning candle but not blowing it out.

The film will arrive in Britain in October.

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