Lovely young Nick Guest (Dan Stevens) from a middle-class home falls into (unrequited) love with his college mate Toby Fedden (Oliver Coleman), comes to live with Toby's wealthy family in their splendid house in Notting Hill and falls in love with them too – "Brideshead Revisited" in London, in fact. Toby's father Gerald (Tim McInnerney) is a Tory MP and craven admirer of "the Lady", Margaret Thatcher, who is in the ascendant, post Falklands, while his mother Rachel (Alice Krige) is from a wealthy Jewish banking family.The action, which unfolds in three Acts, is nicely boxed between Thatcher's two re-elections in 1983 and 1987. Nick discovers that the glittering Feddens, including Toby's sister Cat (Hayley Atwell), are not as noble as they seem, and when he becomes an embarrassment to them he is discarded.The film sticks fairly close to Alan Hollinghurst's novel and retains its Gay sensibility – we see things from Nick's point of view. Somehow the Nick of the film is a more sympathetic character than the Nick of the book – possibly because of Dan Steven's cool performance. Hollinghurst wanted to remind us of what it was like to be Gay in Britain in the 1980s – legalized but subject to widespread homophobia and threatened by the march of AIDS, then a death sentence. The film picks this up very graphically with perhaps greater impact than the book. The wealthy "new money" Thatcherites are given a going over as well (the Lady herself puts in a cameo appearance at the end of Act 2). With supporters like those the Thatcher revolution was always going to be bloody.Nick himself is more interested in art than politics; his "line of beauty" is a curved line (the "Ogee") drawn by Hogarth which happens to coincide with the line of the male buttocks. His relationship with the Feddens is aspirational rather than mercenary (his lover Wani (Alex Wyndham) provides the cash for their "Ogee" magazine). In the end, one can imagine him, like his father, an antique dealer, smacked down by the upper class he sought to join. (Funnily enough, antique dealing in Britain is full of Public School types – "Lovejoy" is a bit of an aberration.) Andrew Davies has produced a typically seamless adaptation, and virtually all the performances are faultless. Some of the minor roles are the most vividly executed, such as Christopher Fairbanks' Barry Groom, homophobia personified, and Barbara Flynn's common as muck Lady Tipper. The class system in Britain was certainly robust enough to survive Mrs Thatcher – she just created a new class of wealthy philistines.

Alan Hollinghurst's brilliant novel THE LINE OF BEAUTY has been well adapted for film by Andrew Davies and brought to BBC television by director Saul Dibb and an outstanding cast. That television miniseries is now available on one DVD with each of the three parts intact as seen in the UK (not the parceled version shown in the USA) and it is a satisfying transition from Hollinghurst's visual poetry to cinematic depiction.The story takes place from 1983 to 1987 in England - the Thatcher years - when class differences, hypocrisies, paparazzi, and homophobia were peaking. Essentially the tour guide through this time is one Nicholas Guest (Dan Stephens), a 'middle class' son of an antiques dealer who has just finished Oxford (on scholarship) and visits the home of his wealthy roommate Toby Fedden (Oliver Coleman) whose father Gerald (Tim McInnerny) is climbing the steps of politics as his warmly understanding and supportive wife Rachel (Alice Krige) looks on and worries about their knotty daughter Cat (Hayley Atwill) who loathes politics and sees the hypocrisy spoken by all of her father's associates. Nick is welcomed into the family with genuine warmth and he is smitten by the grandeur of their lifestyle and the beauty of their home: he becomes their surrogate son when Toby leaves for adventures with his shallow sweetheart, taking care of at times self-mutilating Cat.Nicholas is gay, finds love with a lower class handsome black man Leo (Don Gilet), and shares his proclivities with Cat, his confidant. Insidiously Nick becomes a full part of the Fedden family, serving as a son would, entertaining at parties with them, and meeting the important people whom Gerald engages in his political pyramid. Among them is a Lebanese family whose wealthy son Wani Ouradi (Alex Wyndham) catches Nick's eye and though Wani is 'engaged' to a girl he also is a severely closeted gay man and Nick and Wani become entwined in drugs and love. When the spectre of AIDS begins to diminish the population of England some secrets are revealed, secrets of sexual liaisons that are intolerable for the Feddens and their associates yet lead to the hypocrisy of affairs within Gerald Fedden's protected world. It is the surfacing of the true lives of the characters that proves to be the downfall of Nicholas and his relationship to the world of wealth as well as the crumbling of the fragile political, media-infested world of Gerald Fedden's creation.The cast is uniformly excellent and Dibb is able to coax the acrid aura of England of the 1980s with lucidity and a sensitive eye for revealing corruption and fractured human relationships. If the viewer is left with the feeling that Nicholas does not really deserve our concern because of his hollow devotion to wealth as a means to happiness then the point of Hollinghurst's novel has been well served. The film is not without flaws (a pianist at one of the soirées, we are told by supertitles, is paying Grieg's Piano Concerto....when that could not be further from reality!), and insufficient time is given to the Nick/Wani and Nick/Leo relationships to allow us into the inner sanctum of gay life in this tough time, etc., it still is an engrossing drama and one very well played by credible actors. Grady Harp

Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line of Beauty' is, at least in this adaptation, a version of 'The Great Gatsby' fitted to 1980s Britain, the story of a young man from an ordinary background who mistakenly harbours too many illusions about the beautiful people of the smart set. The story lacks the utter poignancy of Fitzgerald's book because the hero (who, co-incidentally or not, shares the name of Nick with the other novel's protagonist) only rejects his adopted world when it rejects him; But the screenplay, cinematography, and performances are all first rate, especially that of Tim McInerny, playing a MP whose ultimate ruthlessness, self-righteousness, and rottenness, is hidden beneath a layer of almost genuine charm and kindness. The political overtones of the story are somewhat lost in a treatment that dwells almost exclusively inside the gilded balloon, and all of the characters could be handled less sympathetically with some justification, but the indulgent early mood reaps final reward when things go sour. Screenwriter Andrew Davies made his name with the contemporary series 'A Very Peculiar Practice', but these days seems to concentrate largely on period drama. This aberration proves itself welcome, and leaves one hopeful of more to come.

So far after week two of "The lone of Beauty" I am a little disappointed.Some of the acting is good, as long as we except that it is only drama.I am unsure how people can feel that this FICTIONAL DRAMA is "factual" coverage of the "Thatcher" years - it is okay as drama, but I feel the award winning book is still much better.I Wonder if the BBC will ever give us the follow up and the next part of the drama and the years that follow with "Things Can Only Get Better" finishing with 2006 and the Fact that we are still waiting! with that promise from a Government that is full of sleaze.