 Stephen Fry’s adaptation of Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” sparkles in places but often fails to rise above humdrum social comedy. Waugh’s satire jags through the stuffed shirts only on occasion: the napping major, the bored debutante, the iron-gripped muckraker, a party in a sanitarium (“The gramophone’s under the bed”). Fry certainly nailed the set-pieces, including the visit to Peter O’Toole’s Colonel Blount, the hilarious performance by Stockard Channing and her little angels, and the fascist customs house.
Especially good is Agatha’s coke-headed rampage in the racecar, the narrative’s emotional and poetic climax. Waugh’s metaphor is given a full life by the ghastly images Fry gives us of Agatha roaring blindly across empty fields; there’s a particularly vivid tracking shot across her windshield as she clutches the wheel, manic-looking in her goggles, doomed to go along for the ride—as her kind will—until the petrol or the “naughty salt” runs out.
But her madness is treated in the fashion of a Ginsberg, as if Fry wants us to pity these poor fools their wasted lives. He gives Agatha a maudlin little farewell scene with hallucinatory insights Waugh wouldn’t have allowed her. In the middle of all this, Adam, played by Stephen Moore Campbell, functions as the the film’s conscience. His Adam, with a face as expressionlessly open as C-3PO’s, is intelligently naive in the tradition of the nineteenth century comic novel. I thoroughly enjoyed the scene in which Adam earnestly reports to Nina on the prospects of their marriage. Flush with cash, he can marry her, but a moment later, after the money vanishes, he must call it off. Marriage as a financial transaction was never left so shiveringly naked.
Later, when Adam is forced to give up Nina because his rival has more money, the earlier scene takes on a darker hue. But Waugh gives it a final, hilarious twist, when Adam carries the logic to its full extent and “sells” Nina to pay his hotel bill (and what man hasn’t dreamed of reversing the cashflow of the heart on a money-grubber like Nina?). Moore’s Adam pinballs between these contrivances with the aplomb necessary to foreground the insanity of the English upper classes. As good as Moore is, Adam’s one foot in, one foot out presence creates a tug of war between Waugh’s broad satire and what appears to be Fry’s need for emotional ballast.
Waugh’s withering assaults are frequently diluted, especially later on, when Fry reunites Adam and Nina in a scene straight out of a Richard Curtis groaner. (Candles? Check. Arrows pointing to lover upstairs? Check. If only Barry White had been born a few generations earlier.) The couple we see dancing in the twilight of London during the Blitz can’t possibly be the same couple we knew earler, and it feels like a lack of conviction on Fry’s part rather than the final stage of the moral education of these characters. Indeed, the pungency of Waugh’s comedy rises up from the subtle bottomlessness of his satire—it’s never clear how deep his misanthropy really goes. The blade of Fry’s satire looks sharp and pointy, but like a classic Hollywood prop it merely retracts on contact. |
