Not 'Vile' enough: 'Bright Young Things'.

There are plenty of Noel Coward songs, performed by the composer, on the soundtrack of Bright Young Things. And why not? This film, written and directed by Stephen Fry, is an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel Vile Bodies, and surely Coward is, next to Waugh himself, the great poet of British frivolity between the world wars.

     Dance, dance, dance, little lady
     So obsessed with second best
     No rest you'll ever find.

The songs evoke aristocratic (or at least moneyed middle-class) youths: insolent, insouciant, jaded (or, as they would say, frightfully jaded,) hungry for novelty, disbelieving in love yet on the constant lookout for it. In Waugh's books and in this movie we see the young people for and of whom Coward sang, launching themselves on comic sprees that often accelerate into nightmares.

There's one tiny anomaly about these songs that reveals something about the entire movie. The voice singing is not that of the young Coward, who himself epitomized the 1920s, but is that of the almost elderly Noel recording his classics for Columbia Records in the late 1950s. The songs themselves only pretend to be world-weary; they are actually vibrant and romantic. But the voice belongs to a man who is truly, though enchantingly, jaded. Coward looks back in affectionate cynicism at the would-be cynicism of his youth. The texture of his mature voice infuses these youthful songs with the noblesse oblige of a memory-rich old age.

What the aged Coward did to his own songs is what director Stephen Fry has done to Vile Bodies; he has taken an early Waugh novel and infused it with the melancholy spirit of much later Waugh.

Vile Bodies (1930) was the author's second novel, published when he was only twenty-seven. Like most of the works from the pre-Brideshead Revisited period (A Handful of Dust may be an exception), it is aggressively brittle. "So you think my characters are shallow?" Waugh seems to be saying. "Well, so do I. And I will punish them brutally but condignly for their shallowness; and I will make you laugh out loud at the punishment I mete out." It is never the characters who sweep you along but the narrator's voice. Beneath the clink of champagne glasses and the blare of dance bands, you hear a dirge for the waste of life these young people are committing and the subsequent decline of a nation's spirit. Waugh, a right-wing patriot, tortures his Pierrots, Harlequins, and Columbines for their hedonism, their fecklessness, and their know-nothingness about what is happening to Britain and British character. With the publication of Brideshead, Waugh's writing mellows, becomes more elegiac, less dependant on shock and modernistic ellipses. You don't have to listen hard for the dirge beneath the prose; it has risen to the surface and thickens Waugh's ethos of a proudly self-segregated Roman Catholicism dwelling embattled in an increasingly cheapjack, creedless England. Waugh's religion is not only his salvation but his romanticism. (Lord Byron had his club foot; Waugh had his Catholicism.)

Stephen Fry has hewed fairly close to the plot of Vile Bodies with its account of the struggles of Adam Symes (Fenwick-Symes in the novel), a young writer struggling to make enough money to get married to his Nina, but Fry has also, quite rightly, jettisoned most of Waugh's many brief side trips--conversations between oldsters about the frivolities of the young, a passage about low-budget filmmaking, a wonderful philosophical discourse on racing cars as illustrating the difference between Being and Becoming--because he knows that these literary delights would only stall the movie. And Waugh's narrational voice is gone, of course: the characters, settings and farcical doings have to fend for themselves on screen. Because Fry has found the right cast, commissioned the right settings, and staged the farcicalities with all of the skill of an entertainer who has himself performed P. G. Wodehouse (he played Jeeves on Masterpiece Theater) and Oscar Wilde, and has written his own comic novels, the fizz and insolence of early Waugh comedy comes across well.

Much of the dialogue is straight from the book and is as delightful to hear as to read. But Fry wasn't content merely to produce a series of comic talking heads. His use of visual detail as social commentary is in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. When Adam and his gossip-columnist chum, the impoverished aristocrat, Lord Balcairn, secure a table in a crowded, tony restaurant, Waugh tells us it is because the managers are hoping for a mention in Lord B's column. But Fry lets us see the blueblood gossip columnist's despised status by placing his table near the kitchen and by having waiters jog his guest Adam's elbow twice while hustling to serve others. This rudeness isn't emphasized by a close shot; it's a detail that adds texture to the scene and pinpoints just how muddled the once strictly structured British class system became after the Great War.

Fry's sense of color and tempo perfectly captures the accelerating burnout of the Jazz Age. Look at the way he and his cinematographer, Henry Braham, have so intensely lighted the bandstands in the nightclub scenes that the jazzmen seem to be angelic messengers summoning the partygoers to a frenzied last judgment. And when Adam and Nina, travelling in a cab at night, are having one of their many whiny exchanges about getting married, the scene is made oddly poignant, almost doomy, by the iridescent way Braham has filtered street lights through the cab's windscreen. This perfectly trivial couple, these butterflies who can't seem to control or even affect anything in their own lives, momentarily appear as romantically compelling as Charles Ryder and Lady Diana in Brideshead Revisited. Thus Fry gives us young and old Waugh in one package. Served well by his cameraman, he has used a visual palette that gives us a sense of expectancy, as if the filmmakers were telling us, "You may not be able to take these people seriously now, but you will, trust us, you will."

Still, it is the script, not the photography, that must make good on this promise. What scriptwriter Fry has done is place the movie's last twenty minutes during the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 and through the subsequent war. We find ourselves in the historical and emotional territory of Waugh's mature masterpiece, the trilogy Men at Arms, a mixture of black comedy and romantic sadness, not at all brittle and not at all Jazz Age stuff. (Waugh does invent a war to conclude the book, but it is a fantasy-apocalypse that apparently breaks out in 1930.)

I was thoroughly entertained and almost persuaded by Bright Young Things. Two objections held me back. First, Fry and his visual collaborators have so successfully recreated the British Jazz Age of the 1920s that I was jolted when Neville Chamberlain's voice announces on the radio the bad news about Poland. Though historical eras certainly overlap, and though elements of the Jazz Age surely carried over into the 1930s, the latter era had its own texture and style and culture-heroes (Auden and Orwell more than Coward). If you want to sample the '30s Waugh, try reading the general strike episode in Brideshead Revisited. No trace of that '30s atmosphere appears in Bright Young Things. When the Chamberlain announcement was made, I felt that the movie had jumped a decade. I'm not faulting Fry for not being slavishly faithful to Vile Bodies, but for not making an entirely coherent film.

Second, since Fry wants us to take his hero and heroine seriously enough to prepare us for the poignant final scenes, he has cast the talented, substantial, and even rather solemn Stephen Campbell Moore and Emily Mortimer as Adam and Nina. Unfortunately, not only can these two not disguise the fact that they are playing flibbertigibbets, but the harder and harder they try to lend weight to their characters, the more offputtingly idiotic their actions appear. The rest of the cast--Peter O'Toole, Jim Carter, Julia Mackensie, Fenella Woolgear, Richard Grant, Jim Broadbent, et al.--have no such problems since they are all playing madcaps or eccentrics; and they are all delightful.

As is Bright Young Things. The demand for coherence, as Waugh's Miss Agatha Runcible might tell us, is just too too shymaking, darling. Don't be shy about seeing this entertainment.