Brideshead Revisited (12A)

It is almost impossible to watch this new version of Brideshead Revisited without the double distraction of what has come before.

The first is Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel of gilded youth and guilt-oppressed Catholics between the wars, which I read aged 17 and found so bewitching I haven't dared to look at it again since. The second is the Granada TV serial of 1981, which overcame the traditional problem of literary adaptation by simply making it as close to a replica as possible: every last pause and sigh in the book seemed to end up on the screen. A recent revisit of the serial on DVD showed it had aged astonishingly well, and its status as the most faithful book-to-screen translation will, perhaps, never be challenged.

So can anyone explain why a film version, with its obligatory short-cuts and blurrings, might be a good idea? No doubt it came down to the argument that this would be a Brideshead for "a new generation" (yawn), with the attendant novelty of fresh faces, a switch in its storytelling technique, or a shift in the thematic emphasis.

Well, let's take them in order. The faces are certainly fresher, since Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews – memorable as they became – were rather too old for the parts. In their place are Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder and Ben Whishaw as Sebastian Flyte, both of them fine actors but ill-used here.

Goode, deprived almost entirely of the voiceover that makes sense of Charles's inner life and outer perspective, struggles manfully with a role that now renders him a sneaky social climber rather than a besotted interloper. Whishaw's casting is just calamitous. Sebastian is the figure on whom so much of the story depends: his charm and recklessness are the irresistible forces that bind Charles and doom himself, but Whishaw can't manage either. He's just a spoilt, petulant queen who deserves a good slap. Hayley Atwell, as Julia, is beautiful enough, yet even were she able to match Diana Quick's glittering hauteur and inward torment, her most important scenes – the one at the fountain, the other after her father's death – have been cut to ribbons. Yet almost the entire psychology of the novel has been thrown out.

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Should we blame the screenwriters for this? Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock are faced with the tricky task of condensing Waugh's sumptuous prose and languorous pace into a running time of just over two hours, so we must accept that sacrifices have to be made. Yet they don't do themselves any favours by dispensing almost entirely with Charles's narration, a useful tool that might have helped to bridge the yawning gaps and confusing flashbacks.

Then they make characters disappear more suddenly than an overnight Stalinist purge. Anthony Blanche (Joseph Beattie) is not just a stuttering sybarite, he's the story's real truth-teller and a reminder to Charles of all that was best in the Oxford generation. He gets short shrift here, as do Mr Samgrass, Boy Mulcaster and even Charles's wife, Celia (Anna Madeley).

The saddest thinning of all the characters, I think, is that of the youngest Flyte sibling, Cordelia, and not only because Felicity Jones looks so right for the part. Her clear-sighted commentary, which rounds out both the family and Charles's infatuation with them, is another loss the story can ill-afford.

As if wilfully reminding us of the TV Brideshead, the film again uses Castle Howard in Yorkshire as the Marchmains' country estate. However pleasant to have another look at the old place, it does serve to emphasise the gulf in quality between then and now. Director Julian Jarrold makes a good-looking job of the Oxford and Venice scenes without ever dispelling the impression that we're being hurried through a selection of elegant tableaux, arranged by a team that wants us merely to tick off the sights without pausing to consider what anything means.

The tendency to compress is one thing; more regrettable is the tendency to fudge. The devout Catholicism of Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), for example, has been twisted out of recognition: she comes over less a papist than a gimlet-eyed high priestess of a voodoo cult. No Catholic of any class would oblige a house-guest to attend their private worship; indeed, a non-believer would be far more likely to be discouraged from it. Thompson, who specialises in chumminess, is all wrong for this control-freak matriarch anyway, and the terrifying way she in which she turns on Charles in the novel becomes here another fluffed set-piece. The deathbed embrace of the faith by Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) was the one time I felt moved – I confess it – though Julia's eagerly encouraging looks at his bedside gave Atwell the air of a punter watching her horse come in at 100-1.

The script's dismal misunderstanding of Catholicism also dooms the whole arc of Charles's spiritual journey. Initially damned as the "atheist" outsider (Waugh characterised him only as an agnostic), he must finally come to a recognition that the loss of loved ones – first Sebastian, then Julia – has been redressed by the gain of spiritual grace. But the film doesn't get this, and instead of suggesting Charles's acceptance of faith, it leaves him merely nursing his sense of solitude in the abandoned chapel of Brideshead.

If you didn't know the book, you'd be inclined to think that Davies and Brock were merely recounting the story of a love triangle between two damaged aristos and their socially ambitious friend. Is there anything really to savour in it? I enjoyed Ed Stoppard's cameo as the eldest (and least human) Flyte sibling, Bridey; Goode's voice falls agreeably on the ear; and the Great Hall at Castle Howard is a thing of beauty. It's not much to offer a newcomer, who would be best advised to read Waugh's novel; failing that, to get hold of the TV serial. Either would be preferable to this copy of a copy, and a rather inadequately handled one at that.