Everything old is new again and Bright Young Things, the first film directed by openly gay actor Stephen Fry is perfect proof of that cliché. Based on Evelyn Waugh's 1930 novel Vile Bodies, the movie takes place in London at the closing of the Jazz Age but the hedonistic pursuits of the resident 'madcap' set referred to in the title are the same as those of any other memorable Youth Quake moment in club culture history.
It's not hard to imagine this group of hardened sybarites kicking up their platform heels at Studio 54, snorting everything in sight at Limelight in the 1980s or falling into K Holes at one of those club kid parties that were so popular in the mid to late 1990s. What's harder to do is care about these All About Me types as the movie and the characters age from bright to dark. But before the lights dim there's plenty of vim and verve from this collected group of Me Firsts and Fry has done his best to translate them to the screen.
Adam Symes (Stephen Campbell), the poor but terribly witty chronicler of his rich and beautiful friends, has written a Roman á clef about them (called 'Bright Young Things' naturally) that is seized by the customs department for 'indecency' as he is trying to re-enter England. This prevents any further monetary advances from his publisher (Dan Akroyd) and puts up another roadblock in his plan to marry the beautiful but bored Nina (Emily Mortimer) as Adam once again is without funds. What else to do but attend another party?
Fry then gives us two: the first shot through a red filter and populated by attendants in red devil costumes and the second in shades of blue. We meet the rest of the Bright Young Things (BYT's) at these parties. They all sort of meld together while clamoring for more thrills and loudly declaring their boredom. The most memorable is the gay fop Miles who wants a piano but settles instead for cocaine and the young male gossip columnist Sneath who narrowly escapes the party after being spotted. After skulking away he breathlessly phones in this report to his newspaper: 'Be glad you have nothing to do with this world. Its glamour is a delusion, its speed a snare, its music a scream of fear.' Sneath, called Photo-Rat by the BYT's, then makes up a slew of wicked stories about everyone present and having had the last word puts his head in the oven for good measure.
But the party swirls on nonplussed as Adam continues to come up with different schemes to make enough money to satisfy Nina, Miles suddenly has to leave the country to avoid prosecution for being a homosexual (after the police discover letters to his racecar driver lover) and the blond BYT, whose name I never quite caught, has a nervous breakdown and celebrates that with a cocktail party while in the sanitarium. WWII intercedes and instantly the public's fascination with the fluffy ones disappears. It's time to Grow Up and put away childish things for the BYT's, but the film (and I would imagine, the book) suffers for it.
Fry's love for this material is palpable. He not only wrote and directed but he also executive produced and has from the looks of it, done those jobs very well. Casting, however, is another story and is the movie's greatest drawback. These supposedly outrageous characters are played by the most unexciting lot of actors imaginable. And by adding cameos by Stockard Channing, Jim Broadbent, Peter O'Toole and others, Fry emphasizes this. The dullest of the dull are the two leads: Campbell, with his flared nostrils, is blandly handsome and not particularly vivid and is matched in mediocrity by Mortimer's kitten with a whip Nina. Variations on these two characters were played in Cabaret by Michael York and Liza Minnelli and by George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany's. Would that Fry have been so lucky, with his directorial debut, to have had either pair—or younger versions of O'Toole and Channing as his leads—all things would have been bright and beautiful instead of murky and mediocre.
'Oh what a wicked web we weave' my friend Victor whispered to me during yet another confusing plot twist in the new Hitchcock Vertigo rip-off, Wicker Park. 'And weave and weave and weave' I retorted as we both nodded in unison. By the time this incoherent mess wrapped up, the web included parts of The Birds, large doses of Single White Female, Strangers On A Train, and Laura. Josh Hartnett, who must have a very active Tiger Beat fan club (how else to explain his continued film employment?), plays the title role of an artsy photographer gone corporate obsessed with finding his lost love who is, of course, a ballet dancer. Several of the locations seen a few seasons back on the Chicago edition of The Real World can be spotted and just like that reality series, none of the characters or situations here is remotely believable or involving (it also makes perfect idiotic sense that most of Wicker Park was shot in Montreal). A stinker.
Local Screenings:
Music Box's 75th Year
Hard to believe in this age of the mega-plex, but The Music Box, Chicago's premiere 'old time movie palace,' is celebrating 75 years with three days of special screenings Sept. 7-9. www.musicboxtheatre.com for further information. The schedule:
Sept. 7—Audience Choice Day includes the acknowledged classics Metropolis and Rear Window and the director's cut of the still controversial Brazil (classic or not so classic?—I veer on the side of the latter).
Sept. 8—The Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz is a new way to experience my favorite all-time film for the young and the young at heart.
Sept. 9—Four films released in 1929, the year the Music Box opened its doors. Early Hitchcock (Blackmail), Marx Brothers (The Cocoanuts), Laurel & Hardy (Big Business) and Lubitsch (The Love Parade).
