The Line of Beauty

Okay, so it may seem unfair to review The Line of Beauty after having only seen Episode One, but the sneaky peek on show last night at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival gave every indication that this adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning novel is a classic in the making.

Everyone who has read the novel will have his or her own impression of the characters and locales. (I lived in Notting Hill for more than a decade, so my mental picture of the story was probably more vivid than most.) But within minutes of the bravura opening sequence (grafted onto the novel by canny adapter Andrew Davies), director Saul Dibb makes Nick Guest's world his own.

What I found so extraordinary about this adaptation (or at least the first episode) is how cleverly Davies has mined the novel for humour, social commentary and romance. On- screen representations of the upper-middle-classes tend to show us the wholly implausible world of PG Wodehouse, but without Wodehouse's wit, or stick the knife in with bitter class hatred. The Line of Beauty does neither; showing us the Fedden family warts and all. Gerald Fedden MP (in a stunningly good characterisation by Tim McInnerney) is quite the pompous paterfamilias, but is also generous, funny and kind.

As our "eyes and ears" through the story, newcomer Dan Stevens is pitch-perfect; his clear, blue eyes miss nothing as his life becomes more and more entwined with the Feddens and their glittering world.

The clips shown of the following two episodes promise no decline in quality, so if The Line of Beauty does not come quite as close to perfection as Brideshead Revisited - which remains the high watermark of British television drama - it is still shaping up to be landmark adaptation, and not to be missed when it premieres on BBC2 later in May.

A naive young man falls in with a wealthy Tory politician and his family in 1980s Britain.

Wonderful adaptation of Hollinghurst's novel, expertly cast. The greed, selfishness, hedonism, ignorance and bigotry that for many sums up the Thatcher era are all on display as Stevens' innocent abroad Nick is drawn in and swept away by the Feddens family. Even as we see Nick become an almost indispensable member of the family, so we know his sweetness and ingenuousness must surely be his undoing...

Stevens is brilliant, effortlessly capturing the essence of the well-meaning and ingratiating Nick, and he is formidably supported by all concerned, from the key players (McInnerny, Atwell, Krige) to the host of fantastic cameos on display. A must-see for anyone who came-of-age in Thatcher's Britain.

Alan Hollinghurst's brilliant novel THE LINE OF BEAUTY has been well adapted for film by Andrew Davies and brought to BBC television by director Saul Dibb and an outstanding cast. That television miniseries is now available on one DVD with each of the three parts intact as seen in the UK (not the parceled version shown in the USA) and it is a satisfying transition from Hollinghurst's visual poetry to cinematic depiction.

The story takes place from 1983 to 1987 in England - the Thatcher years - when class differences, hypocrisies, paparazzi, and homophobia were peaking. Essentially the tour guide through this time is one Nicholas Guest (Dan Stephens), a 'middle class' son of an antiques dealer who has just finished Oxford (on scholarship) and visits the home of his wealthy roommate Toby Fedden (Oliver Coleman) whose father Gerald (Tim McInnerny) is climbing the steps of politics as his warmly understanding and supportive wife Rachel (Alice Krige) looks on and worries about their knotty daughter Cat (Hayley Atwill) who loathes politics and sees the hypocrisy spoken by all of her father's associates. Nick is welcomed into the family with genuine warmth and he is smitten by the grandeur of their lifestyle and the beauty of their home: he becomes their surrogate son when Toby leaves for adventures with his shallow sweetheart, taking care of at times self-mutilating Cat.

Nicholas is gay, finds love with a lower class handsome black man Leo (Don Gilet), and shares his proclivities with Cat, his confidant. Insidiously Nick becomes a full part of the Fedden family, serving as a son would, entertaining at parties with them, and meeting the important people whom Gerald engages in his political pyramid. Among them is a Lebanese family whose wealthy son Wani Ouradi (Alex Wyndham) catches Nick's eye and though Wani is 'engaged' to a girl he also is a severely closeted gay man and Nick and Wani become entwined in drugs and love. When the spectre of AIDS begins to diminish the population of England some secrets are revealed, secrets of sexual liaisons that are intolerable for the Feddens and their associates yet lead to the hypocrisy of affairs within Gerald Fedden's protected world. It is the surfacing of the true lives of the characters that proves to be the downfall of Nicholas and his relationship to the world of wealth as well as the crumbling of the fragile political, media-infested world of Gerald Fedden's creation.

The cast is uniformly excellent and Dibb is able to coax the acrid aura of England of the 1980s with lucidity and a sensitive eye for revealing corruption and fractured human relationships. If the viewer is left with the feeling that Nicholas does not really deserve our concern because of his hollow devotion to wealth as a means to happiness then the point of Hollinghurst's novel has been well served. The film is not without flaws (a pianist at one of the soirées, we are told by supertitles, is paying Grieg's Piano Concerto....when that could not be further from reality!), and insufficient time is given to the Nick/Wani and Nick/Leo relationships to allow us into the inner sanctum of gay life in this tough time, etc., it still is an engrossing drama and one very well played by credible actors. Grady Harp

Now that all three episodes have aired in the U.S., one may fairly comment on the overall production.

Any comparison to The Great Gatsby is at best superficial, given that the only clues are incidental to the main thrust of the story. In most respects it is a uniquely British tale with relevance to any similar American theme to be found in something Reaganesque or Bushite rather than anything from the era of Calvin Coolidge. Interestingly, Margaret Thatcher is labelled in one telling scene as more the tool of the ruling classes than their leader -- just as their American contemporaries in the Republican Party have been.

But the main elements of the story -- class division and envy, reverse snobbery, interethnic relations that have evolved from the disintegration of the Empire -- are less comparable to the scene on this side of the Atlantic. Simple hypocrisy of the kind found in nearly all politicians and the hubris resulting from too much success found too young in life lie at the center of it all. Add to that the drug scene and AIDS in the 1980's and you have a compelling story.

The title is also intriguing. It suggests that beauty may be found in amongst all the hypocritical swill running as counteractive impulses that seem on the surface to be merely eccentric. Thus the character of Nick, casually characterized by the housekeeper as "no good," is really something of an antihero. At the beginning of the story he is all superficial and bright, and at the end he is simply bemused.

It may be melodramatic and a bit soapy, but I liked it.

The Line of Beauty is in some ways a social, LGBTI drama amidst high-class politics in the UK. Without Thatcher's reign there would be no The Line of Beauty for sure. It's also about class, and the lines of class that grew during the Thatcher years.

The Line of Beauty has impressive production values, and I'd love for a sequel set in the Blair years. For the sequel I nominate acclaimed British actor Danny Dyer to play the lead role.