Philip French Movie of the week
The cinema has done quite well by Oscar Wilde’s work. There have been versions of Lady Windermere’s Fan by Ernst Lubitsch and Otto Preminger; a plush Alexander Korda film of An Ideal Husband; a superbly cast The Importance of Being Ernest with Edith Evans’s definitive Lady Bracknell; Albert Lewin’s stylish The Picture of Dorian Gray; and an attractive modern treatment of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime starring Edward G Robinson in Julien Duvivier’s portmanteau movie, Flesh and Fantasy.
His character, however, has been less well served. Still, the cut-price 1959 Oscar Wilde, starring a pompous Robert Morley, and the well-mounted 1960 The Trials of Oscar Wilde, starring a trim, heterosexual Peter Finch, seemed like towering masterworks when Ken Russell came up in 1986 with the appalling Salom’s Last Dance, in which Wilde (Nickolas Grace) sees his play staged in a London brothel.
The Morley and Finch pictures were constrained by censorship and social conventions and contributed to the movement that brought about the homosexual-law reforms of the mid-Sixties. Now that there is no love that dare not speak its name in the cinema or anywhere else, Brian Gilbert’s Wilde comes across as a traditional biopic that picks up its subject’s career in 1884, just as he’s about to marry, and ends two years before his death with the final meeting between Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas.
The earlier films gave meaty roles to Ralph Richardson and James Mason as Sir Edward Carson, the brilliant barrister and former college friend who destroyed Wilde in court. Gilbert’s movie treats the trials almost perfunctorily, and it doesn’t have much to say about either Wilde’s relationship to society or the way his sexual proclivities affected his art.
What it does – through a combination of Julian Mitchell’s intelligent, literate script and Stephen Fry’s magnificently rounded and wholly convincing performance – is to produce a remarkable portrait of the man and to illuminate his key friendships with Robbie Ross (Michael Sheen), the early lover who became his most devoted friend, and Bosie Douglas (Jude Law), the lover who destroyed him.
The film opens superbly with a prologue (imaginatively developed from a couple of paragraphs in Richard Ellmann’s biography) where we’re shown Wilde visiting a Colorado silver mine during his 1882 lecture tour of the United States. He’s lowered down a shaft in a bucket and gives the young miners a little lecture on Cellini. In a couple of minutes this sequence (with its hints of homoeroticism and a descent to the lower depths) establishes Wilde’s wit, boyish charm, composure, courage, didacticism, and his unpatronising combination of patrician and democrat.
Nothing thereafter is quite as good as this, but the picture is never less than intelligent. Clever use is made of Wilde’s fairy tale, The Selfish Giant, as a narrative device to reflect on Wilde’s character and his attitude to his wife (Jennifer Ehle) and children.
The performances all around are first-rate, with Tom Wilkinson outstanding as Wilde’s nemesis, the appalling Marquess of Queensberry. Among the film’s highlights is the occasion when Bosie introduces his father to Wilde, and Queensberry is won over by Oscar’s charm.
For all its sexual frankness, Wilde is a discreet work that moves us, but never shocks or disturbs.