Jared Leto plays the title role in a film adaption of a novel by Wilkie Collins, not a guy terribly known to today's audiences, but who had a good popularity in his day. He was a good friend of Charles Dickens and this film Basil is kind of like a dark version of David Copperfield.
Derek Jacobi lends his presence to this film as Leto's very proper Victorian gentleman father whose strict standards cause him to lose the affections of both his sons who grow up to be Ralph Bonham Carter and Leto. As a young kid Leto catches his father en flagrato with another woman so when his beloved and sickly mother dies, Leto is rather inclined to do like Dad does, not like he says.
All of which makes him putty in the hands of Christian Slater who has a deep seated hatred for Jacobi and you have to see the film to know what it's about. Content yourselves with what I've already told you Jacobi and you can figure it out. He and his girlfriend Clara Forlani set young Leto up good and proper and he becomes the second son to have been cast from his father and Bonham Carter was similarly thrown out.
Like David Copperfield we see the protagonist over the years grow from little kid to full adulthood and like Copperfield, Basil gets involved with two women, the second being the one that counts in the person of Rachel Pickup, a young girl taken in by Jacobi and whom he grew up with. But some truly dark impulses involving sex and infidelity that Dickens would not have explored for a protagonist of one of his novels are present in Basil and in Christian Slater's character of John Mannion.
Leto and Slater are present in this British Victorian novel clearly for American box office. Still both do an excellent job with Slater not even attempting a British accent in the tradition of Clark Gable from Mutiny On The Bounty. Basil is not in the league with that MGM classic, but it stands well on its own merits.
Derek Jacobi lends his presence to this film as Leto's very proper Victorian gentleman father whose strict standards cause him to lose the affections of both his sons who grow up to be Ralph Bonham Carter and Leto. As a young kid Leto catches his father en flagrato with another woman so when his beloved and sickly mother dies, Leto is rather inclined to do like Dad does, not like he says.
All of which makes him putty in the hands of Christian Slater who has a deep seated hatred for Jacobi and you have to see the film to know what it's about. Content yourselves with what I've already told you Jacobi and you can figure it out. He and his girlfriend Clara Forlani set young Leto up good and proper and he becomes the second son to have been cast from his father and Bonham Carter was similarly thrown out.
Like David Copperfield we see the protagonist over the years grow from little kid to full adulthood and like Copperfield, Basil gets involved with two women, the second being the one that counts in the person of Rachel Pickup, a young girl taken in by Jacobi and whom he grew up with. But some truly dark impulses involving sex and infidelity that Dickens would not have explored for a protagonist of one of his novels are present in Basil and in Christian Slater's character of John Mannion.
Leto and Slater are present in this British Victorian novel clearly for American box office. Still both do an excellent job with Slater not even attempting a British accent in the tradition of Clark Gable from Mutiny On The Bounty. Basil is not in the league with that MGM classic, but it stands well on its own merits.