E-Mail This Article to a Friend BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

The thankless task of adapting Evelyn Waugh’s satire Vile Bodies to the screen is here undertaken by the British comedian Stephen Fry, who did not have the courage to use the book’s title. This banalizing cowardice extends into all corners of the film: Fry changes one character’s name from "Lady Metroland" to "Lady Maitland." The "bright young things" were Waugh and his upper-class circle in 1920s London. Waugh’s book was not a nostalgic romp like Fry’s movie but a concise send-up of a dumb, doomed race. The novel is still timely: it charts the slide of a period of wealth and frivolity into one of depression and war. Fry’s movie is a merely a period piece, its characters rendered as screwballs. The young cast members, Mouseketeers doing Oscar Wilde, are unmemorable; the movie’s veterans (Dan Aykroyd, Stockard Channing, Peter O’Toole) are ineffective. The whole troupe seem possessed by the film’s spirit of niceness and prettification, a spirit, needless to say, alien to Waugh, just as Waugh’s chilled, outraged tone is alien to them. (106 minutes)