If you are a devout Catholic ready and eager to defend your faith or a confirmed atheist who believes Catholicism especially is without substance or merit, you will be inexorably drawn to “Brideshead Revisited” and after have plenty to think and talk about.

This newest adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel (the TV version came out in 1981), is exquisitely crafted, and though the 1945 novel covers the previous decades, it is as timely as tomorrow — for deep down, this is not only a marvelous portrait of character, but a study of a religion’s soothing and deleterious effect on those who embrace or scorn it.

Matthew Goode plays Charles Ryder, son of a rather distant father, and although well off by most standards, he is not in the same economic class as Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), who he meets and befriends at Oxford.

It’s not totally clear whether they strike up a homoerotic relationship, but as the friendship is depicted here, they grow to love and respect each other with intense pleasure, especially when Charles visits Brideshead, the Flyte family estate, as dark and cloistered as it is opulent. In a mansion housing a chapel, the dominant artwork is a Renaissance painting of the Madonna with the Christ child.

Plagued by guilt

Unlike Charles, who has no use for religion, Sebastian comes from a devoutly religious Catholic family, one all but addicted to sin and guilt. Played with a stern forbidding intelligence by Emma Thompson, Lady Marchmain, Sebastian’s mother, dwells more on the hereafter than on the immediate feelings of her three children, including Julia, played by Hayley Atwell. No doubt, Lady Marchmain has had a hand in wrecking Sebastian’s life, instilling him, we infer, with anguish over his sexuality. A raging alcoholic, he has only one port of safety and that is his friendship with Charles.

That, too, is compromised when Charles falls for Julia. But as the lady makes clear, she may tolerate a man of lesser means in the family, but not one with the wrong religion — and in this case, no religion at all. This brings us to Charles, the central character who in the first scene before the flashbacks tells us he is dominated by one emotion, and that is guilt. The movie leaves us wondering whether things might have been so much better for everyone had Charles converted to Catholicism. Perhaps Waugh, who himself adopted the faith, is telling us exactly that.

Ambivalent author

But the author is too much the artist to jump on a religiously didactic bandwagon. He clearly regards these matters with ambivalence — for if spiritual comfort can result from faith and devotion to one’s creed, how comforting is life with a fanatically religious mother who keeps a spiritual adviser with all the tolerance of The Grand Inquisitor? That’s Joseph Beattie (Anthony Blanche), the epitome of narrow-minded Catholic creep.

There’s a reason we are whisked off to Venice with Charles and the three children. It’s not only to meet Sebastian’s father Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), a convert from Anglicanism, but to observe and reflect on the contrast between the European Catholic and Papists with Anglo-Saxon roots. Clearly, the Venetians seem happier, less rigidly morose than their British counterparts. Here, away from Brideshead, Charles and Julia fall in love; the children’s father is a more boisterously content man living with another woman and away from his wife.

But this is not the end of it; we will meet Lord Marchmain once again, and there are some profound implications that arise with the encounter, the most ironic of which is that of an atheist who ends up living with guilt.

This adaptation of what many consider Waugh’s finest work (many regard it as one of best novels of all literature) is both provocative and entertaining. It also features some wonderfully, full-bodied performances from actors who create characters who engender compassion for their conditions, and I include flawed people like Thompson’s domineering mother.