First, the important stuff: Aloysius is alive and well. There had been rumours that the teddy bear had been given his marching orders from Julian Jarrold�s Brideshead Revisited, but here he is, in the arms of dear, dear Sebastian once more.

Brideshead Revisited (12A)
Star rating***
Dir: Julian Jarrold
With: Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, Matthew Goode

First, the important stuff: Aloysius is alive and well. There had been rumours that the teddy bear had been given his marching orders from Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited, but here he is, in the arms of dear, dear Sebastian once more. This is a different Aloysius, however - paler, smaller, a pipsqueak of a bear compared with the solid, ursine star of the television series. Like toy, like movie. While achingly tasteful, Jarrold's picture has taken Waugh's elegant, stately novel and knocked the stuffing out of it.

Granada's version of Brideshead Revisited, originally broadcast in 1981, was among the first television dramas to thumb its nose at the notion that the small screen could never do justice to serious literature. The 11-hour series about impossibly grand, emotionally tortured types who lived in houses that could only be measured in football pitches was a critical hit and ratings smash. With John Mortimer on the writing team and Sir John Gielgud in a supporting role to young bucks Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews, this was television as national treasure.

Hardly a hop, skip and a jump to follow, but Jarrold gave himself a sporting chance by hiring costume drama king Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Vanity Fair) and Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland) to write the screenplay. For the part of Sebastian he enlisted Ben Whishaw, one of the best of British acting's bright young things, and for big name recog-nition he cast Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, the matriarch with ice in her veins and God in her heart. Finally, Jarrold had the might of Disney behind him. No one, never forget, messes with the mouse. Ask Aloysius.

Given all this, Brideshead the movie shouldn't have gone far wrong. It doesn't, yet nor does it go terribly right. Davies and Brock have done a remarkable job of distilling the story into a feature-length film, but the time crawls by, as if we are taking in a real time version of a story that spans the decades. At times it's like watching Farrow and Ball paint dry.

Jarrold's picture opens during the Second World War with captain Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) being billeted at Brideshead. Walking the marbled halls once more sparks remembrances of times past, some of them glorious but most, as he acknowledges, tinged with guilt. With a swirl of Adrian Johnston's score the film waltzes back to a pre-war age of innocence, when Charles met the man who first brought him to Brideshead, Lord Sebastian Flyte.

Whishaw's Sebastian is a very different character from that played by Anthony Andrews. For a start, he has brown hair. First Bond goes blond, now golden boy Sebastian turns brunette. Strange times we live in indeed. Whishaw's Sebastian is more effeminate, fragile and vulnerable than Andrews's version. For all his darling friends and endless carousing, it is plain that this is a damaged soul, a frail creature in search of someone to save him. That someone, he trusts, is Charles.

The Oxford section is the film's finest hour, largely because the captivating Whishaw is front and centre of the action. The rest of the picture, taking in Charles's relationship with Julia, his tussles with Lady Marchmain, and his ceaseless struggle to fit in where he, a humble painter from Paddington, can never belong, is lovely to look at but rarely engaging.

Things liven up whenever Emma Thompson arrives to lay down God's law to Sebastian and Charles, or when Patrick Malahide, playing Charles's gloriously sardonic father, puts in an appearance. Besides them, the rest of the cast struggle to match Whishaw for impact. Goode takes too literally Charles's tendency to float through life, observing much and participating little. Hayley Atwell, as Julia, comes across as a mildly peeved slip of a girl rather than an emotionally torn woman.

As everyone goes through the motions, the picture serves up a platter of period cliches. Shots of steam trains, classic cars, cloche hats, drop waist dresses, cigarette holders, slo-mo walking, and enough over-the-shoulder glances to give every actor a lifelong crick in the neck - it's all there, should you be in the mood for it.

Yet the epic sweep so essential to any retelling of Brideshead Revisited is missing. When Whishaw disappears the light goes out of the film, leaving behind a sombre affair which is content to touch upon, but never explore, the novel's themes of faith, love and loyalty.

Jarrold showed in Becoming Jane, his take on Austen's early life, that he could freshen what had become an oft revisited story. In Brideshead he does the opposite. Waugh's novel might be a period piece, but it is not a museum exhibit to be kept behind thickened glass. It either engages the audience with a compelling story and dynamic characters or, like Jarrold's picture, it gathers a handful of dust.

Aloysius should be thankful he didn't have to bear more of it.