Flashbulbs pop, martini glasses clink, liaisons turn dangerous, and partygoers lean over mirrors and inhale "naughty salt" in the opening swirl of Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's England-between-the-wars novel Vile Bodies. In the middle of it all, star Emily Mortimer makes a pronouncement that sounds strange at the film's outset but makes sense by its end: She's bored. The movie opens in the middle of a party, but she's already reached the point where boundless exuberance and casual vice have grown oh-so-tedious. Waugh's readers will instantly recognize that state of mind. A cutting, melancholy satirist, Waugh chronicled English high and middle society with unpitying wit and a fundamentally conservative sense of exasperation. He showed up for the party, but what he didn't find dull, he learned to hate.
Making his feature-film writing and directing debut, Fry seems to understand this sensibility intuitively. He plays Waugh's socialites and social climbers for laughs, but never loses the sense that their frivolousness has consequences. Co-starring as a struggling writer trying to save enough money to wed Mortimer, Stephen Campbell Moore recognizes the downside to the highlife almost from the start. He may have Mortimer's heart, but without money, he can't hope to keep it. Eventually, he finds what seems like the perfect scheme: Assuming the reins of a gossip column after a friend commits suicide, Moore begins writing breathless items on made-up nobles and fictional trends for bottom-line-minded newspaper publisher Dan Aykroyd.
The scam works for a while, allowing Fry to explore all the corridors of swinging London before life yanks the floor from beneath his partygoers. Capturing a celebrity- and scandal-infatuated world of misplaced priorities, Fry no doubt found inspiration in the correspondences between Waugh's novel and the world today. Fry's vision has been filled out to the fine details, but his episodic film works best on a moment-to-moment basis, as when Peter O'Toole turns up as Mortimer's unhelpful eccentric father, or when the fatally unreflective Fenella Woolgar awakes in a strange house and slowly puts together where the party has taken her, and why all those photographers have camped outside waiting for her to leave.
A comic figure on a tragic course, Woolgar embodies Waugh's mix of wit and sadness and fills out the film's best moments in a way its proper hero and heroine never can. Though nicely acted by Moore and Mortimer, they're more convenient exploratory vehicles than proper characters. Late-film segments that carry the 1930 novel through WWII and attempt to invest the protagonists' love with substance only accentuate their thinness: Essentially, the film stays at the party too long. But for a good stretch, its combination of twirling excitement and dry absurdity captures the spirit of characters too intoxicated to realize they're dancing over a chasm.