Review: Bright Young Things

There is much that is divine about Stephen Fry's directorial debut, based on Evelyn Waugh's novel Vile Bodies. From the vivid frenzy of the opening scenes in which scores of young, wealthy and wilfully irresponsible folk party into the wee hours, it is clear that this is not going to ape the sedate gravitas of a Merchant/Ivory movie.

Fry's camera moves and circles his colourful subjects, craning vertiginously overhead and sliding into odd angles to reflect the madness of the era and the society.

The time is the Thirties, the place England. Ignorant of the terrible sacrifices made by their parents' generation in the Great War, the gilded scions of the moneyed classes re-enact the Roaring Twenties of America in an endless round of parties and jaunts to the country for horse or motor racing. Their antics fuel the gossip columns of the newspapers, particularly The Daily Excess whose Canadian proprietor, Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd) is as much a part of the scene as his prime gossip-monger, Simon Balcairn (James McAvoy).

When the aristocratic Balcairn is threatened with sacking, he files a fictitious account of a party which he upgrades from mild mischief to a cocaine-fuelled naked orgy before putting his head in the gas oven.

Monomark immediately hires impecunious but well-connected writer Adam Symes (Stephen Campbell Moore) to step into the breach. To avoid a similar fate, Symes simply invents characters for his gossip column while struggling to maintain his romance with the capricious Nina (Emily Mortimer).

Among the principals is Agatha Runcible (Fenella Woolgar), a kind of party planet around whom most of the others orbit like satellites. And it is her ultimate fall - commencing with a racing car and ending in a mental ward - that fractures the glittering scene. As war looms in Europe it is clear that the party is soon to be over.

Fry's dialogue is terrific and interlaces with Waugh's own wit seamlessly. He encourages his young cast, many refreshingly unknown, to play up more than down.

"So many little people," sighs Agatha with patent lack of concern. "What can they all do with their lives?"

And there was a felicitous irony in watching Michael Sheen as the flamboyant gay Miles enquiring: "I don't suppose anyone has any naughty salt?" at the same time as he was playing Tony Blair in Channel 4's drama The Deal on television. My few reservations are that Fry has softened the edges of the novel's satire; he scratches the paintwork of these youthful high rollers where Waugh cuts their brake cables.

The most significant change is the ending which is reassuringly benign, allowing more optimism for the future than the emotional chaos expressed in the novel. Moreover, Fry introduces an element of pathos which Waugh, I suspect, would not have countenanced.