Cinema: Rushes: Jul. 4, 1988

A HANDFUL OF DUST

Evelyn Waugh was not in the best of spirits when he wrote A Handful of Dust. He poured his grief at the dissolution of his first marriage into this tale of how dimly amoral Brenda Last cuckolded her dimly moral husband Tony. Waugh managed to cast a cold, wickedly glittering eye on these foolish innocents, and to write about them with bitter, controlled irony. Both suppressing and drawing upon fury and bathos, he produced a masterpiece.

Which is not at all the same as producing something suitable for Masterpiece Theater. That is what Director Charles Sturridge and Producer Derek Granger are good at. They worked on the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, a novel more in tune with the filmmakers' earnest approach. They are respectful, gently pruning and rearranging Waugh's plot to suit the imperatives of another medium. They have a nice taste in period decor, and they can tap the mannerly acting styles of Judi Dench, Alec Guinness, Anjelica Huston and Pip Torrens.

Everything important in A Handful of Dust is in the film: Brenda's almost somnambulistic descent into adultery; Tony's puttering obsession with his awful hereditary home; the death of their child, the tragedy that brings them to crisis; Tony's final flight up the Amazon toward the novel's immortal conclusion. James Wilby's Tony is stoically wet, and the subtlety of Kristin Scott Thomas' charmlessness as Brenda is awesome. But the malice, as well as the compressed energy of the novel, is beyond Sturridge and Granger. Waugh moved us to tears; this adaptation invites only respect. -- R.S.