Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited epitomises everything that is wrong with modern film. Indeed, I’ll go further: it epitomises everything that is wrong with modern art and culture. I have been saving this card, this little diatribe for readers as a birthday present or as an alternative to a post-it note with ‘Michael is on holiday’ or ‘Michael has tonsillitis, again.’ However, I’m being forced to play it now because a film has recently been released which so superbly answers Brideshead, does so superbly what film, what art can do that I feel they must be put side by side for comparison. This film is Sam Taylor Wood’s Nowhere Boy.

I’ll declare my hand here, as I’d intended to when this piece was merely going to be a pleasurable vent on something so disappointingly bad: I’m not a particular fan of Evelyn Waugh; I think the novel Brideshead Revisited is patchy, self-indulgent in places and does not hang together; I did not spend my days at university wishing for a ‘Brideshead’ experience as I’d not read the book then; neither do I find the TV series as great a work for the small screen as so many do. That being said, I was astounded at just how bad the 2008 film really was. It could and should have been brilliant, particularly given the cast. Instead, the entire film was utterly reductive – a distillation of the novel from something layered and subtle to something obvious and simplistic.

One could debate for a long time the real nature of Charles’ and Sebastian’s relationship, but that is partly the point. A space is left for a reader’s, or in this case viewer’s, interpretation. The one exception was the controversial addition of the kiss – which in my view was actually done sensitively. One could argue that it does not define their relationship as homosexual or even Sebastian as homosexual so much as furthering the emotional intimacy that has grown up between these two young men. But uncertainty, subtlety, nuance are not good things in Jarrold’sBrideshead, neither are they good things in a culture that detests anything which can’t be said plainly and simply so that everyone can understand it (even if doing so leaves many people failing to be understood). Why must it be defined? Why can’t we be left wondering whether their relationship is sexual, is simply filial or occupies an awkward middle ground in which intimacy thrives without the easy, social definitions that everyone seems to crave? Given that this is a novel that furthers such uncertainty it seems particularly crass that Andrew Davies’ adaptation of all adaptations should be desperate to prescribe, label and easily package every single event and feeling.

Charles is completely passive in the kiss with Sebastian, one imagines so that a simple-minded audience needn’t be taxed as to the plausibility of his later relationship with Julia, the certainty of his heterosexuality – certainty of any sexuality even – or the varieties that can exist within human relationships. In a further break with the novel, Julia accompanies Charles and Sebastian to Venice so the film can establish a love triangle in which Sebastian catches his sister and friend kissing. If this scene is not worthy of mere soap opera then this later one is: Sebastian drunkenly shouting at Charles, in the middle of his sister’s debut, ‘You never cared about me all you ever wanted was to sleep with my sister.’ Hollyoaks does Evelyn Waugh, ladies and gentlemen! Is that message loud and clear enough for everyone? Sebastian’s a gay but Charles isn’t.

Similarly, religion is reduced to a simplistic fairy story and those who peddle it merely use it for their own ends. Maybe Richard Dawkins should ask for a credit. Lady Marchmain is not treated with any sensitivity or depth – she is not a mother with conflicting views as to what is in her children’s best interests, torn between the demands of their souls on earth and later in heaven. Instead she is a cold, caustic school marm to whom Charles says, ‘God is your best invention. Whatever you want he does.’ Why look for depth or complexity – a multi-faceted world of motivations and desires – when the crux, as seen by schoolchildren, can be so neatly condensed into a script of sound bites.

Undoubtedly the script is most at fault in Brideshead, whilst it leads the long-list of those deserving unfettered praise in Nowhere Boy. The first time I saw Sam Taylor Wood’s feature length debut there were moments that jarred, moments where I thought ‘Is the scriptwriter going a bit far there?’ because Lennon’s cruelty would appear to come from left field, at the most inopportune moment. But it began to dawn on me that this is why the film is so brilliant, so effecting, so real and utterly unlike Brideshead and its ilk. Greenhalgh and Wood don’t lead the viewer through a sanitised world, scripted with a narrative arc that rises by gentle increments, nicely fulfilling the viewer’s expectation and paying them out with easily packaged themes or messages. Instead we are torn, throughout, between three people, desperate to love one another and incapable of expressing or showing it. For this reason it is often the moments of greatest cruelty that betray the profound levels of intimacy and understanding that lie beneath. Even the jokes, of which there are many, are both imbued with warmth and the desire to wound. For example, John and Mimi’s exchange in which she says, ‘Your sarcasm worries me sometimes,’ and he replies, ‘Not up to your high standards, eh Mimi?’ Or the scene in which his mother has thrown him a birthday party and Lennon behaves every inch the aggressive adolescent but with no means of expressing it. The audience winces as he tells Julia that McCartney’s mother died of cancer before adding, ‘What’s your excuse?’ And the nasty edge to his jocular speech in which he crows, ‘I hate you all equally. Except for you, Mum.’

At this point the viewer is waiting for the denouement, but it doesn’t come. It’s held off. We’re distracted, as are the characters, in this case by Julia having to pretend that she’s fine to her young daughter, who is checking that her mother’s crying is not indicative of another bout of depression. Even when the origins of the arrangement that saw John brought up by his aunt are explained this feels like yet another beginning. Or at least, another episode without an end. Nothing is resolved. Neither is the audience allied to any one of the characters. The love they have for each other is evident and, in their own ways, they all behave both well and badly. John can be unremittingly cruel, but is also a typical adolescent struggling to make sense of the events in his life and his sense of abandonment; Julia is the sexy, exciting alternative parent that everyone would crave – ironically filling that role only because she has failed John as a mother; whilst Mimi is strict, uptight and refuses to admit fault but also has the thankless task given to those who love consistently and in their charge’s best interests. And she’s never thanked. Because such a thing is the realm of other films. The best she gets is an awkward moment with John before he leaves for Hamburg in which he tells her ‘Don’t be silly,’ just as she told him at the start when his Uncle George died.

Much has been made of Taylor Wood’s conservative direction given her background and yet Nowhere Boy is stunningly beautiful: the refrain of the wash of the sea; Julia’s tears when John returns to Mimi only visible in a dirty mirror; the warped, dreamlike world of childhood memory. Taylor Wood has also taken the brave decision that the music should be the music of the fifties, not the sixties, and Beatles’ influences, not The Beatles themselves. Indeed, the band is never mentioned and, as Aaron Johnson said, this film could be about anyone. It just happens to be about John Lennon.

By failing to make the viewer’s life easy – one of simple, take-away messages or characters easily described as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – Wood has made a film for grown ups, with grown up complexities and a real world lack of resolution. Even at the close, when Lennon’s song ‘Mother’ plays over the credits, the viewer speculates on how Mimi will cope when she hears of John’s death, how she’ll cope with the later public depiction of her as a tyrant. I can’t understand why the critics have not gone wild for Nowhere Boy. To misquote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Art reveals truth that reality obscures.’ By being understated, subtle and complex Nowhere Boy shows us something profound within our own relationships. It does so by not being Julian Jarrold’sBrideshead Revisited that feels like it must be telling us something because we’re left with all these glib little truisms that suggest profundity. But actually, by being simplistic and reductive Jarrold’s Brideshead is not art and neither is it real. Real life is never as shallow or as neatly packaged as his film depicts. Real life is like Nowhere Boy. It is that which Sam Taylor Wood reveals.