Brideshead Revisited, Update

So I finished it. All 11 hours of the original miniseries, Brideshead Revisited, late last night, and it kept getting sadder and sadder. I don’t remember it being so sad. At the end we are left with people with pretty desolate lives, Julia, Charles, and Cordelia. And what happens to Sebastian and his “dipsomania” as his alcoholism is referred to, is just horrible. I think this profile of the English aristocracy before WWII, makes them all seem so incapable of dealing with their problems and so eager to suppress their emotions. The view of Catholicism, I can’t quite wrap my brain around it, but it comes off as another character in the movie – an authoritarian mother with no mercy for the wavering. Again, as I have said in earlier blog entries, watching “old” movies made even in 1979, seem like from a different time all together. Scenes are drawn out, people are shown walking from one location to another, and conversations last more than 30 seconds. This is a miniseries that really does justice to Waugh’s book of the same name, and I can’t imagine how the new movie, also of the same name, can possibly portray this expansive novel in 2 hours. I am going to see it surely. Maybe it will even come to a location near me, doubtful, but there are always DVDs.