'Brideshead': A sweet but simpler visit

0 Comments | USA TODAY, July, 2008 | by Claudia Puig

Those who are weary of summer's bawdy comedies and superheroes will be heartened by Brideshead Revisited, which is grandly revisited as a feature film.

The adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel is not as nuanced as the lavish 12-hour British television series, shown on PBS in 1981. But the pre-World War II story of lost innocence is intelligently written by Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones's Diary) and Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland) and handsomely mounted by director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane).

Matthew Goode (Match Point) is superb as Charles Ryder, a middle-class Oxford student who is swept up by the aristocratic Marchmain family and their glorious ancestral home. He becomes infatuated with their way of life and with the young Marchmains,...