Hitherto, still Stephen Fry's one-time directorial offering, BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS, a film adaption of Evelyn Waugh's novel “VILE BODIES”, is set in an interwar London, aspirant author Adam Fenwick-Symes (Moore) is our token leading man, one recurrent theme is that his intending marriage with socialite Nina Blount (Mortimer) is totally contingent on the lucre he can acquire, 1,000 pounds can be no sooner obtained from a trivial bet than thrown away in a cavalier wager in the horserace. And differing from Waugh's novel, Fry's script suffixes a transactional switcheroo to temper the novel's bleak ending with a high-toned irony that is only to be expected from the man who famously over-eggs undeterred dignity when he impersonates Oscar Wilde in Brian Gilbert's WILD (1997).
The film leafs through various vignettes of the escapades carried out by the close-knit coterie of Adam, those “bright young things” conduct a decadent party-driven lifestyle, mixed with gossip-infested yellow journalism and accident-prone car races, until the war breaks out, putting the kibosh on the life as they know it, and those who are batting for the other team and living in the clouds will be severely punished. Fry's directorial flourishes are ample on show, staging boisterous fancy dress parties with all the necessary trappings, cameras swirling and swooping like nobody's business, and the gaudy chromatic choices effervescently heighten a bygone era's eerie, unattainable mystique.
As a sophisticated satire, other than delving deeper into those finely-dressed characters, Fry's film endeavors to capture the caprices and quirks that completely cloister the leisure class from the rest of the world. Depravity is sedulously moderated, a scandal at 10 Downing Street is the most sensational, but elsewhere, punches are pulled, Michael Sheen's queer Miles Maitland is ostentatious only on the eyes but barely has a subplot to himself.
Mustering almost half of the entire sphere of British thespians, the cast is an embarrassment of riches, with prestigious names like Peter O'Toole and John Mills in cameos and bit parts, but first-time actor Stephen Campbell Moore only makes a bland man- about-town, whereas a 23-year-old James McAvoy shows appreciable ranges as the desperate columnist Simon Balcom, and as the bohemian fruitcake Agatha, a ditzy Fenella Woolgar is both hilarious and heartrending with her larger-than-life bravura. By and large, BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS is a coruscating time capsule that attests the old-time adage: all that glitters is hardly gold.
referential entries: Brian Gilbert's WILD (1997, 7.1/10); Marleen Gorris' MRS. DALLOWAY (1997, 7.8/10); Whit Stillman's METROPOLITAN (1990, 7.6/10).
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