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Bright Young Things

2003, Movie, R, 105 mins

Bright Young Things: Review

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Stephen Fry's gloss on Evelyn Waugh's satirical tale of British jazz babies dancing on the lip of an abyss lacks the novel's drier-than-dry bite, but compensates with a strong ensemble cast and a series of glamorous party sequences in which the decor has at least as much depth as the guests. Struggling novelist Adam Fenwick-Symes (Stephen Campbell Moore) hopes the advance on his scandalous novel, "Bright Young Things" (coyly attributed to a Miss Sue de Nimes), will enable him to marry his well-born fiancée, Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer). But the manuscript is confiscated at customs when he reenters England from France, setting in action a series of comic reversals of fortune whose punch line is eventually delivered with a literal bang. Before the ride is over, Adam has won a series of bets with supercilious Ginger Littlejohn (David Tennant) and entrusted the money to a drunken major (Jim Broadbent) to bet on a horse; lost the major; taken a job writing gossip as "Mr. Chatterbox" and attended parties so wild that they all dissolve into one long champagne-smudged soiree. Adam and Nina run with a cocktail-swilling, coke-snorting smart set that revolves around madcap Lady Agatha Runcible (Fenella Woolgar) and her best friend, Miles (Michael Sheen), a one-man hurricane of fabulousness. At their best, the sensation-seeking celebutantes are amusingly frivolous and shallow; at their worst they're cruelly oblivious, stiffing their dressmakers, blithely besmirching reputations and banishing hot-eyed hopefuls to social Siberia for transgressions too trivial to mention. Waugh had little use for old-fashioned social proprieties and less for feckless fun-seekers; all you need to know about his withering contempt for England's Lost Generation is encapsulated in his novel's title: Vile Bodies. Fry is gentler, apparently convinced that there's something rather sweetly naive about their single-minded pursuit of gaiety and wants us to care when suicide, madness and exile thin their ranks, even though they're getting exactly what's coming to them. Though the film's leads are for the most part relative unknowns, the supporting cast is packed with stellar cameos, including Peter O'Toole as Nina's slightly dotty father, Richard E. Grant as a power-mongering cleric, Stockard Channing as vulgar American evangelist Mrs. Melrose Ape, Bill Paterson as the prime minister, Dan Aykroyd as publishing baron Lord Monomark, Simon Callow as the deposed King of Anatolia and Sir John Mills as a titled duffer who takes to his first accidental taste of cocaine like a pig to mud. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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