A Handful of Dust

A story that raises many questions, even good ones, but gives only a few answers. A great cast, James Wilby is for example excellent as Tony Last, goes to work in this beautifully filmed melodrama set in the early thirties i UK and Brazil. The period feeling is great and so are the settings. The story is built up around a doomed marriage, but it is hard to really understand why. There is a lot of smoke here but no real fire until the late and great Sir Alec Guiness comes to work in the last 30 minutes creating a frightening illiterate fan of Charles Dickens. But superb acting on all hands and high class camera-work is not enough although the film is worth watching especially if you have a love for British culture and history, and don't we all...

source: Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust

British television of the 1980's managed to produce scores of movies and miniseries based on classic novels. Name a book by a British author of the 19th or early 20th centuries, and you can bet there's an adaptation for British TV. Most of them are faithful, well-acted, full of authentic period details, and don't have the same nettlesome commercial sensibilities of American TV. A lot of them are very good: for example, the long series of Sherlock Holmes stories starring Jeremy Brett, or Fortunes of War with Emma Thompson. One problem: they tended to crank these things out, with the same actors and directors, so that one period piece set at an English country manor featuring well-spoken actors in tailored tweeds looks and feels more or less like any other period piece set at an English country manor featuring well-spoken actors in tailored tweeds. With Evelyn Waugh, that's a big problem. Waugh is a hilariously funny writer, even when he's writing about infidelity and death and the other terrible things that happen in "A Handful of Dust". So the film version, with Kristen Scott-Thomas, Alec Guiness, and Stephen Fry in a small role, follows the plot of the book, and uses much of the dialogue, but they've cut out most of the humor. Take a scene from the book where Tony and Jock get very drunk and telephone Brenda (Tony's wife) and stagger around to her flat in the middle of the night. In the book this scene goes on for several pages -- they phone her, get lost, phone again, have a few more drinks, etc -- but in the movie it lasts all of two minutes. In another part of the book there's a parish priest who recycles his sermons from thirty years earlier, all of which were written while he served in the army in Afghanistan; the parishioners don't mind the references to deserts and jungles and tigers. That's not in the movie at all. It's not a bad movie, just very disappointing if you've read the book. "Bright Young Things", Stephen Fry's more recent adaptation of Waugh's "Vile Bodies" was a much more accurate version of Waugh's black humor and satire. The humor is almost entirely missing from "Handful of Dust".

That Evelyn Waugh was a master of irony seems to have escaped the makers of "A handful of dust" who have consequently produced a movie that is a conventional tragedy. Marital infidelity is a theme he revisited often,here it is the key to the whole story,the catalyst that sets the terrible events in motion. Tony Last's wife is bored with him and his obsession with his crumbling ancestral home.She takes a lover,an archetypal 1930s "trimmer" called John Beaver,a strange young man who lives with his mother who has fallen on hard times. When the Last's young son is killed in a riding accident she judges the time right to announce she is marrying Beaver. Ever the gentleman,Last allows her to divorce him on the grounds of his "adultery" with a professional co - respondent in a Brighton hotel. Waugh,like Dickens,had a healthy disdain for the legal profession,and the lawyers'contempt for the law and their clients is abundantly clear. A series of not terribly convincing events sees Last ending up in South America doomed to read Charles Dickens in perpetuity to a very unpleasant Englishman who lives amongst the natives. His wife marries his best chum.Floreat Etona. As misery piles upon misery one longs for even the slightest sense that the makers of "A handful of dust" were aware that Waugh was having a gentle poke at the stupefyingly thick - headed upper classes and their hatred of "scenes" or any displays of emotion. If you need an example look no further than our own dear Royal Family. Mr R.Graves fails to give even the slightest clue as to why Last's wife should want to marry him.He is vacuous,dull and boring.Waugh's more famous trimmer was in fact called Trimmer("Men at arms")and despicable character though he may have been,seducer,thief and layabout,he was at least interesting. Miss Scott Thomas is superficially enchanting but it becomes clear as the story progresses that there is a lot less than meets the eye.Of all the actors,she alone seems to have a brush with humanity. Mr J.Wilby opens the movie as one kind of cliché and ends up as another.From Somerset Maugham to Joseph Conrad without a true moment along the way. The other parts are filled competently enough,indeed the whole film smacks of "competence",but,sadly,"competence"is not enough.

I was hopeful when this film started that it would be very enjoyable, the setting was my favorite, a big manor house in the country of England, and the genre being a period film, is also my favorite. But as it got on, I was not happy with where the plot was going. The actors did a fine job. Except for Kristin Scott Thomas's character, the self-centered Brenda Last, the character development was not good. James Wilby as Tony Last was very good, he made me really root for this character and I suppose that is why I hated the end so much. He deserved a better ending. Rupert Graves as John Beaver, was quite dull with no charisma, so I couldn't figure out why Brenda would fall for him. There were some great actors in the cast: Judi Dench, Angelica Houston, and Alec Guinness etc. The story did nothing to allow these great actors to really show their stuff. Angelica's role was a cameo at best. Judi Dench had a bit more lines, but really also a cameo. Additionally, the Brazil part of the movie seemed quite out of place. I'm sorry, but the end left me feeling cheated and saying "What?!". Not my cup of tea. I was going to recommend it to a lady I know that likes period films, but after it was over, I changed my mind.

I decided to watch this purely on account of the magnificent cast, not realising it was another Evelyn Waugh adaptation. Maybe if I'd known, I wouldn't have bothered because I absolutely HATED Brideshead Revisited, also directed by Charles Sturridge. Perhaps the necessary compactness of a film adaptation compared to the lumbering drawn-out length of the Brideshead TV-series is what made it work for me. What a magnificent film this is: sensitively directed, beautifully shot and the amazing cast absolutely spot-on. The understated performances of James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas as the two doomed main characters are just perfect to make this strange story come to life. The stellar supporting cast all add up to a feast of fine acting. In my opinion, AN UNDERRATED MASTERPIECE.

A really good book cannot be entirely simulated adequately on screen. There is too much going on underneath, too many subplots, too much conversation and description to undertake in two hours. Choices made by production folk determine which direction the film will go, generally accenting one plot line of or other and allowing the rest to fall to the wayside. HOD does a fine job with the route it takes, darkly stating the consequences of empty lives which rely on artifice for sustenance. These creatures were not creating their lives so much as feeding their idea of existence without exploration. The result is tragedy but the tragedy was already in existence. The actions of the trapped subjects simply began to reflect their emptiness. This doesn't make for a happy movie but it is instructive if one chooses to see the lessons. And as art, the acting, direction and cinematography are quite fine.

A hidden treasure in a sea of mediocre and formulaic films. The cast is excellent! Great love triangle story. Alec Guinness is wonderful. Kristin Scott-Thomas is a fox!

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER Evelyn Waugh was one of the most stylish writers of his generation and the deceptively simple prose of his early mordant satires ('Decline and Fall', 'Vile Bodies') stands up very well today. 'A Handful of Dust,' written during the break-up of his first marriage to Evelyn Gardiner ('She-Evelyn') is more personal and less comic, and more concerned with the consequences of the characters' lack of personal morality. This film version by Charles Sturridge, who was earlier jointly responsible for a fine TV version of 'Brideshead Revisited,' is a worthy attempt to do justice to the novel, but perhaps he need not have bothered. The film follows the novel as published in England – a US edition had a different, happy ending - though for space reasons some incidents are omitted (eg the drunken night at the sleazy 'Old Hundredth' club). Tony Last (James Wilby) is a pleasant young dim Tory gentleman, the proud owner of Hetton Abbey, a pile of Victorian Gothic bombast, and the attentive but slightly baffled husband of Lady Brenda (Kristen Scott-Thomas), elegant, aristocratic, and bored to death after seven years of country life. They have a cute six-year old son, John Andrew (Jackson Kyle), who seems to relate better to his nanny and riding instructor than to his parents, who are equally awkward with him. A young man called John Beaver (Rupert Graves) invites himself to stay, and Brenda, despite Beaver's vacuity, decides to have an affair with him, renting a small flat in Mayfair from Beaver's mother (Judi Dench) for the purpose. Then an accident occurs which prompts Brenda to reveal her affair to Tony (almost everyone else in their circle knows of it already) and leave him. Tony, having met an explorer named Messinger, sets off with him to Guyana, South America, in search of a lost city, but the expedition falls apart and Tony is rescued by Todd (Alec Guinness), a part-white man living with the Indians. Todd wants someone to read him Dickens, and Tony finds himself a prisoner. The re-creation of life at Hetton; mists over the park, the huge, overdecorated house (Carlton Towers, Yorkshire, is a perfect match for the fictional Hetton Abbey), the attentive servants, the elegant meals, house parties, Sunday morning at church, the ritual of foxhunting etc, is all beautifully done. We see why Brenda is bored (even if Anjelica Huston's character does drop in by plane), but it is not so easy to see why Brenda takes after Beaver. Jock (a wooden Pip Torrens), young MP, friend of the family and an old boyfriend of Brenda's, seems a much more likely choice, obsessed as he is with the politics of pig-farming. Kristen Scott-Thomas is fine in the role of Brenda but the script lets her down a little. As Tony, James Wilby projects just the right air of amiable, good-natured dimness. We feel sorry for him even as his unlikely fate assumes an air of inevitability. A youthful Rupert Graves gives us a callow and colourless Beaver, egged on by his ambitious mother. The change of scene from England to Guyana is somewhat abrupt, though signalled in the script, and it's almost as if we are watching a different movie. This is not necessarily the filmmaker's fault as Waugh backed an earlier short story of his 'The Man Who Loved Dickens' into the first two-thirds of the novel, which is a kind of prequel to the short story. Yet the events of the whole novel bear close correspondence to Waugh's own experiences, his marriage break-up mentioned above, and a journalistic trip he made to Guyana as a kind of therapy. Unlike the unlucky Tony, Waugh returned from the jungle to tell this, and several other mordant tales. Here the film-makers were not able to give visual expression to Waugh's mood. Perhaps different music might have helped – the theme for 'Brideshead' was perfect. For the most part the actors were well-cast, but they were pinned down by the close adherence of the scriptwriters to the novel's dialogue.

Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, the actors in this movie doesn't give strong performances. I am not saying they are not fine actors in other movies, but I am saying that the roles each of them play in A Handful of Dust is unbelievable and weak. Even that little boy who plays the snotty son wasn't casted properly for his role. And, even when the actors smoked it looked liked they were merely acting. It's a shame. The filming, background, clothes, speech, etc., etc., are all excellent. Too bad the acting wasn't as good. I am sorry. I cannot recommend this movie. I don't think Evelyn Waugh would be too happy with the performances of the actors and actresses of his book.