A Handful of Dust (1988) - film review

England in the 1930s.  Wealthy landowner Tony Last is more concerned over the upkeep of his sprawling neo-Gothic mansion than preserving his marriage to Brenda.  Bored with life in the country, Brenda takes an apartment in London and begins an affair with a parasitic young man, John Beaver, who has social pretensions but no money.  Things come to a head when the Lasts’ seven-year old son is killed in a riding accident.  Her one tie to her old life severed, Brenda decides to divorce her husband so that she can marry Beaver.  Last at first agrees to give his wife grounds for divorce but changes his mind when he realises that the alimony payment she is demanding will result in him having to give up his ancestral home.  As Brenda’s affair with Beaver slowly burns itself out through lack of money, Last undertakes an expedition to South America, where a cruel fate awaits him...

Having won international acclaim for his magnificent television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited in the early 1980s, director Charles Sturridge rose to the challenge of adapting another great Evelyn Waugh novel, A Handful of Dust, but fell somewhat short of repeating his earlier success.  Whilst the film cannot be faulted on its production values, which are exceptional for a British film of this era, nor its acting, it singularly fails to capture the pungent irony and bleak comic tone of Waugh’s darkly satirical novel and feels rather like a lame Merchant-Ivory production, lacking depth and any real emotional impact.  The film is far from being a write-off but anyone who has read Waugh’s novel can hardly fail to be disappointed by this all-too literal and slightly stilted cinematic interpretation.

On paper, the casting appears to be spot-on, although only two members of the cast - Rupert Graves and Alec Guinness - fit their respective roles comfortably, whilst the rest struggle to make much of an impression.  Graves is perfectly cast as the charmless social parasite and portrays his character exactly as Waugh writes him, an unlikeable young man who makes a career of sponging off the idle rich.  Guinness  is equally superb as the sinister Mr Todd, the jungle recluse with an unhealthy addicition to the works of Charles Dickens.  James Wilby was presumably cast as Graves’s romantic rival in the film on account of their previous coupling (as a pair of class-dodging gay lovers) in James Ivory’s recent hit Maurice (1987).  Here, Wilby is somewhat ill-cast and, despite a very creditable performance, his character comes across as weak and ineffectual, and consequently fails to evoke any sympathy.  Kristin Scott Thomas is likewise wasted in the part of the unfaithful wife Brenda, her portrayal too cold and aloof for us to engage with except at a very superficial level.

Pretty as the film is, it is a shame that the central ironies of the novel are virtually all lost in its transition to the screen.  In the novel, Waugh scorns the vacuity and soullessness of his protagonists and delivers a damning indictment of a class that was fast vanishing (and probably deserved to vanish) by the mid 1930s.  In its attempt to portray the soulless, empty lives of the characters, the film somehow itself ends up as a vacuous piece of art, irrelevant to a modern audience and almost completely lacking in meaning.  Whilst the film can be enjoyed for its performances and authentic period feel, its lack of substance and failure to engage with Waugh’s deeper themes about human nature prevent it from being something special.

© Alex Sullivan 2012

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?