Good start, but then it gets ruined

A Major Disappointment

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Although Evelyn Waugh is one of my favourite writers, I cannot think of any great films which have been based upon his works. Or, for that matter, any great television series; I have never been a fan of that monumentally tedious adaptation of "Brideshead Revisited" from the early eighties. I think that the reason why Waugh does not adapt particularly well to the screen has to do with the nature of his writing; he was, in both politics and religion, an arch-conservative who found himself at odds with the progressive spirit of his times and attacked that spirit in a series of bleakly satirical novels. Like many satirists he was not a writer who thought primarily in visual terms (even though he was an art lover); I doubt if anyone reads him for the beauty of his descriptive passages. He had a strong authorial voice for which film-makers often have difficulty in finding an equivalent. Perhaps the best attempt is Tony Richardson's version of "The Loved One", which updated the story from the 1940s to the 1960s and expanded Waugh's satire to take in various aspects of contemporary American life. Although this film has a much more left-wing agenda than Waugh would have been happy with, at least Richardson and his scriptwriters never lose sight of the fact that they are adapting a work of satire. Like the previous reviewer, however, I felt that the makers of "A Handful of Dust" ignored Waugh's irony and simply turned it into a tragedy made in the best "heritage cinema" style. It was directed by Charles Sturridge who was also responsible for that television "Brideshead". Waugh's novel, a tale of adultery among the upper classes, was intended as a satire on the mores of the British landed gentry and social-climbing bourgeoisie, and also on the eccentricities and hypocrisies of the English legal system, especially with regard to divorce. Waugh himself had gone though a divorce a few years earlier and, like his hero Tony Last, had been obliged by social convention to manufacture sham evidence which would allow his adulterous wife to pose as the wronged party. The title is an allusion to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land":-I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust,and Waugh's satire has a bleakness which matches that of Eliot's lines. Something else which makes "A Handful of Dust" a difficult novel to film is its weak structure. The strange ending, in which Tony is held prisoner in the Brazilian jungle by an elderly eccentric who forces him to read the complete works of Dickens over and over, is quite different in tone to the rest of the book and has the air of something tacked onto the novel from a separate work. Which indeed it is- it was originally a separate short story entitled "The Man Who Liked Dickens" and was pressed into service as an ending for the novel, presumably because Waugh could not think of anything more original. The film keeps this ending (although Waugh did in fact write an alternative one for his American publishers), and it cannot be said that it is any more successful on the screen than it is on the printed page. In the novel Tony was a rather dull, pedestrian country squire, and part of Waugh's theme was that he was strapped for cash and finding it difficult to keep up his ramshackle, crumbling country house Hetton Abbey. His surname has obvious symbolic overtones with its implication that he is the "last of his line". (His only son is killed in a hunting accident). His glamorous younger wife is referred to as "Lady Brenda" whereas he is a plain "Mr.", suggesting that she comes from a socially more elevated family than he. In the film, however, we get little sense of his financial difficulties or of a family in decline. Tony as portrayed by James Wilby becomes a handsome, youthful aristocrat, living in a magnificent Victorian Gothic stately home- in reality Carlton Towers, the Yorkshire home of the Duke of Norfolk. The film also stars a number of other luminaries of the British cinema, but few of them make any impression. Kristin Scott Thomas as Brenda and Rupert Graves as her lover John Beaver both have a thankless task; Waugh, still bitter over his own divorce, made both characters completely worthless. Graves has the added difficulty in that Beaver, although worthless, needs to be fascinating enough to be credible as the man who inspires an almost insane passion in a beautiful titled lady. Alec Guinness appears in a cameo as Tony's captor Mr. Todd; it is far from being his best performance, but at least it is not as embarrassing as his role as the Indian professor in "A Passage to India" from four years earlier. Period pieces like this one were a frequent staple of the British film industry in the eighties and nineties, and this trend was the subject of some criticism as evidence of the British national obsession with nostalgia. I have never accepted the validity of this criticism; a number of these costume dramas, such as Merchant Ivory's "A Room with a View" and "Howards End", were excellent in quality and asked some pertinent questions about Britain's past. I have to admit, however, that at its worst "heritage cinema" could be beautiful but lifeless, and "A Handful of Dust", lacking the savage bite of Waugh's novel, falls into this category. Three years later Sturridge was to make an equally lifeless version of E.M. Forster's "Where Angels Fear to Tread". 5/10

That Evelyn Waugh was a master of irony seems to have escaped the makers of "A handful of dust" who have consequently produced a movie that is a conventional tragedy. Marital infidelity is a theme he revisited often,here it is the key to the whole story,the catalyst that sets the terrible events in motion. Tony Last's wife is bored with him and his obsession with his crumbling ancestral home.She takes a lover,an archetypal 1930s "trimmer" called John Beaver,a strange young man who lives with his mother who has fallen on hard times. When the Last's young son is killed in a riding accident she judges the time right to announce she is marrying Beaver. Ever the gentleman,Last allows her to divorce him on the grounds of his "adultery" with a professional co - respondent in a Brighton hotel. Waugh,like Dickens,had a healthy disdain for the legal profession,and the lawyers'contempt for the law and their clients is abundantly clear. A series of not terribly convincing events sees Last ending up in South America doomed to read Charles Dickens in perpetuity to a very unpleasant Englishman who lives amongst the natives. His wife marries his best chum.Floreat Etona. As misery piles upon misery one longs for even the slightest sense that the makers of "A handful of dust" were aware that Waugh was having a gentle poke at the stupefyingly thick - headed upper classes and their hatred of "scenes" or any displays of emotion. If you need an example look no further than our own dear Royal Family. Mr R.Graves fails to give even the slightest clue as to why Last's wife should want to marry him.He is vacuous,dull and boring.Waugh's more famous trimmer was in fact called Trimmer("Men at arms")and despicable character though he may have been,seducer,thief and layabout,he was at least interesting. Miss Scott Thomas is superficially enchanting but it becomes clear as the story progresses that there is a lot less than meets the eye.Of all the actors,she alone seems to have a brush with humanity. Mr J.Wilby opens the movie as one kind of cliché and ends up as another.From Somerset Maugham to Joseph Conrad without a true moment along the way. The other parts are filled competently enough,indeed the whole film smacks of "competence",but,sadly,"competence"is not enough.

The hammerblow of human cruelty dressed in the velvet glove of pre-war hoch-Englishness. It's distressing that terrible things happen to the pathetic yet likable protagonist Tony (James Wilby) - even more so that they are delivered in the slow drip of self-interested scheming rather than in galvanising dramatic confrontations.Actually, Wilby is one of the two weak links of this film. He's not quite got the richness or range to suggest a redemptive development to his character. He's not sympathetic enough. The other might be Sturridge's peculiar, impressionistic direction that can fail to give the story enough propulsion.What the film does have are a number of fine performances from a top-drawer supporting cast. One fears Alec Guiness may be a final-frame cameo, but his contribution is in fact at least as substantial as Brando's in Apocalypse Now. Kristin Scott Thomas is quite excellent, at once endearing and blindly self-interested. And I also liked very much Pip Torrens, a really sharp study of a new sort of British gent - modern and knowing, but no cad. 6/10

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER Evelyn Waugh was one of the most stylish writers of his generation and the deceptively simple prose of his early mordant satires ('Decline and Fall', 'Vile Bodies') stands up very well today. 'A Handful of Dust,' written during the break-up of his first marriage to Evelyn Gardiner ('She-Evelyn') is more personal and less comic, and more concerned with the consequences of the characters' lack of personal morality. This film version by Charles Sturridge, who was earlier jointly responsible for a fine TV version of 'Brideshead Revisited,' is a worthy attempt to do justice to the novel, but perhaps he need not have bothered.The film follows the novel as published in England – a US edition had a different, happy ending - though for space reasons some incidents are omitted (eg the drunken night at the sleazy 'Old Hundredth' club). Tony Last (James Wilby) is a pleasant young dim Tory gentleman, the proud owner of Hetton Abbey, a pile of Victorian Gothic bombast, and the attentive but slightly baffled husband of Lady Brenda (Kristen Scott-Thomas), elegant, aristocratic, and bored to death after seven years of country life. They have a cute six-year old son, John Andrew (Jackson Kyle), who seems to relate better to his nanny and riding instructor than to his parents, who are equally awkward with him. A young man called John Beaver (Rupert Graves) invites himself to stay, and Brenda, despite Beaver's vacuity, decides to have an affair with him, renting a small flat in Mayfair from Beaver's mother (Judi Dench) for the purpose. Then an accident occurs which prompts Brenda to reveal her affair to Tony (almost everyone else in their circle knows of it already) and leave him. Tony, having met an explorer named Messinger, sets off with him to Guyana, South America, in search of a lost city, but the expedition falls apart and Tony is rescued by Todd (Alec Guinness), a part-white man living with the Indians. Todd wants someone to read him Dickens, and Tony finds himself a prisoner.The re-creation of life at Hetton; mists over the park, the huge, overdecorated house (Carlton Towers, Yorkshire, is a perfect match for the fictional Hetton Abbey), the attentive servants, the elegant meals, house parties, Sunday morning at church, the ritual of foxhunting etc, is all beautifully done. We see why Brenda is bored (even if Anjelica Huston's character does drop in by plane), but it is not so easy to see why Brenda takes after Beaver. Jock (a wooden Pip Torrens), young MP, friend of the family and an old boyfriend of Brenda's, seems a much more likely choice, obsessed as he is with the politics of pig-farming. Kristen Scott-Thomas is fine in the role of Brenda but the script lets her down a little. As Tony, James Wilby projects just the right air of amiable, good-natured dimness. We feel sorry for him even as his unlikely fate assumes an air of inevitability. A youthful Rupert Graves gives us a callow and colourless Beaver, egged on by his ambitious mother.The change of scene from England to Guyana is somewhat abrupt, though signalled in the script, and it's almost as if we are watching a different movie. This is not necessarily the filmmaker's fault as Waugh backed an earlier short story of his 'The Man Who Loved Dickens' into the first two-thirds of the novel, which is a kind of prequel to the short story. Yet the events of the whole novel bear close correspondence to Waugh's own experiences, his marriage break-up mentioned above, and a journalistic trip he made to Guyana as a kind of therapy. Unlike the unlucky Tony, Waugh returned from the jungle to tell this, and several other mordant tales.Here the film-makers were not able to give visual expression to Waugh's mood. Perhaps different music might have helped – the theme for 'Brideshead' was perfect. For the most part the actors were well-cast, but they were pinned down by the close adherence of the scriptwriters to the novel's dialogue.