MOVIE REVIEW : Finding a Gem in ‘A Handful of Dust’

A handful of English film makers have done a breathtakingly fine job with “A Handful of Dust” (opening Friday at AMC Century 14, Cineplex Beverly Center), Evelyn Waugh’s spare, masterly novel about the sudden wrong turn of a marriage among the British smart set in 1932.

Under Charles Sturridge’s direction, everything about the novel has been perfectly realized; it is a superlative job even though it alters the tone of the book. The waspish and knowing satire still abounds--these are characters called the Lasts, the Beavers, Polly Cockpurse and Dr. Messinger, after all--yet it’s not a brittle film but a rich, tragicomic character study that retains the book’s lingering after-effects.

Its indolent baby aristos are Tony and Lady Brenda Last (James Wilby of “Maurice’s” and Kristin Scott Thomas, whom you may not remember opposite Prince in “Under the Cherry Moon”).

They have one of those young, very English marriages kept in balance primarily through ennui. Mainly, Tony is in love with Hetton Abbey, his awesomely ugly Victorian Gothic family estate and then with his glowingly beautiful wife and their 6-year-old son, John Andrew (Jackson Kyle, moon-faced, flannel-mouthed and enchanting). As a husband, Tony is not stupid, but his state of devoted bliss has rendered him dangerously complacent.

The Lasts’ careful balance is disturbed by the idle and penniless John Beaver (Rupert Graves, “Maurice’s” lusty gamekeeper), whose arrival as a weekend guest begins to fray the fabric of this stagnated marriage.

In his pursuit of the opalescent, unprotesting Brenda, Beaver is egged on by his treacherous mother (Judi Dench). Mrs. Beaver, a sort of ambulance-chaser of the real-estate business, is determined to turn her son’s every love affair to their own financial advantage.

Mrs. B. acts quickly on Brenda’s desultory remark that she might be looking for a flat in town, and the affair is off and blooming. (For a capsule of the film’s acting skills, watch this scene between the importuning Mrs. Beaver and the elegant Brenda, who conveys an air of being oh-so-subtly put upon. It’s in moments like this that you understand Judi Dench’s recent O.B.E. And you marvel at Kristin Scott Thomas, who is playing one of the great and beautiful monsters of contemporary literature, but playing her with astonishing compassion.)

Although director Sturridge and his co-screenplay adapters, Tim Sullivan and Derek Granger, have pruned characters and incidents, they have retained whole pages of the book’s stinging dialogue. The upper-uppers were never more piercingly skewered than by Waugh, who wanted so desperately to be one of them, yet Sturridge will not let them become caricatures. In that scene following the fox hunt when all eyes are on Tony, we see suddenly that his impeccable manners, which can seem useless or foolish, are gallantry of the purest kind.

The role is the best thing Wilby has done since taking center stage in “Maurice.” (He can be found next in a Galsworthy adaptation, “A Summer Story.”) As Waugh’s betrayed romantic, Tony must grow enormously during the story’s wild turnings, or the whole project dies. And Wilby lets no one down. The casting throughout is impeccable; this is a film where you find Alec Guinness and Anjelica Huston in cameos--linchpin cameos, to be sure.

Huston plays the free-spirited American, Mrs. Rafferty, who as a weekend guest, pilots her own plane onto Hetton’s centuries-old lawns. And Guinness, of course, plays Mr. Todd, “the man who liked Dickens” to a fare-thee-well. Both of them are elegant, but I’m not sure that Huston doesn’t have the more difficult role. Her character is far less heartless and more admirable than she might first seem.

The film’s delights are everywhere, in the keenness of the language and the editing; in the sumptuous details of costume, photography and production design (the Duke of Norfolk’s Carlton Towers) and, especially, in a guiding intelligence as to what Waugh was up to. Sturridge and the film’s producer and co-adaptor, Granger, may be particularly attuned to Waugh after their work together on “Brideshead Revisited.”

If you must cavil, you might wish that this knowledgeable lot had given the source of the film’s title, which comes from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” Without it we lose a crucial insight into the spirit of the piece. Watching “A Handful of Dust” on the screen with Eliot in mind, you may remember “The Cocktail Party,” with Eliot’s parallel character who finds peace in distant jungles. But Waugh had an even more complex scheme in mind for his salvation-seeker: A civilized man mired in Victorian Gothic, who escapes to the jungle only to find himself tethered to Dickens, that eminent Victorian.