Writer-director Oliver Parker has adapted three works by Oscar Wilde for the screen — An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Ernest (both with Rupert Everett), and now The Picture of Dorian Gray. The two earlier films were doubtlessly perfect for film, being based on plays — and, with Wilde’s witty dialogue and carefully structured plots, one can only imagine that the scripts practically wrote themselves.
Dorian Gray (as Parker abbreviates the title) has to have been a different prospect altogether. For a start, it’s not a play but a novel, Wilde’s only venture into that genre. More work would have been needed to make it filmable, and it’s not a particularly easy novel: it’s clumsily structured in parts, and there is a fair amount of digression and filler. Wilde really was a playwright first and foremost; it’s usually the dialogue that works best in the novel, though Parker takes the liberty of borrowing a few Wildeisms from elsewhere to put in the mouth of Lord Henry Wotton, the Wildelike, or at least Wildeish, figure in the book.
But here comes the difficulty. For although Wotton is in some ways a mouthpiece for Wilde, he’s a mouthpiece for the Wilde of a period earlier than that in which he wrote the novel. Wilde was strongly identified with the “aestheticism” of the late 1800s; he was, in fact, its standard-bearer for a time, a deliriously outrageous proponent of art above life, of “artificiality”, of sensual and mental pleasure above “morality” and the usual virtues of a stolid Victorian society.
Yet The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in a magazine in 1890 and in book form in 1891, is by no means a straightforward manifesto for aestheticism. Wilde certainly articulates the views of an aesthete, but the book is also a critique of the movement and its beliefs. After all, the narrative shows how Dorian Gray becomes the most avid disciple of Lord Henry’s aestheticism — and then how it all goes horribly wrong.
Perhaps the most apt description of the novel’s theme is Richard Ellman’s, in his wonderful biography of Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray represents the “tragedy of aestheticism”. It is the aesetheticism of Walter Pater and JK Huysmans, both great influences on Wilde, looking at its reflection in the mirror and seeing not beauty and sensuality but the potential for decay and corruption.
Appropriately, that echoes the well-known story of Dorian Gray, or at least the part of it that is well-known — how Dorian’s portrait ages while he stays eternally youthful. Here is Wilde’s debt to the Faust story, as well as to the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to mention but one of the era’s horror-type thrillers that updated the gothic for staid Victorians obsessed with dualities and the darkness beneath the orderly surface of polite society.
The narrative goes like this. Dorian Gray (Ben Barnes) is a young man of extraordinary beauty who inherits his grandfather’s mansion in fashionable London and makes his debut in upper-class society. He meets the acerbic wit and libertine Lord Henry Wotton (Colin Firth) and the society painter Basil Hallward (Ben Chaplin); the latter paints the young beauty’s portrait, and the unseen hand of some god or demon casts a spell that allows Gray to keep his youth and beauty while the portrait itself ages.
This allows Gray to pursue a life of debauchery without its depredations being visible in his physical appearance: no great baggy grey things under the eyes after a drug-orgy night, no greying hair or sagging belly as the years roll by, no gout, hangovers, cirrhosis or lung cancer. The idea of preserving one’s youth (and health) is surely deeply appealing, hence a large part of the story’s attraction. We’d probably all make some similar bargain if we could.
But there is something rather antiquated in the idea that, unless you have a magic portrait like Dorian’s, inner corruption will necessarily be apparent on your face. We are not so convinced of the congruence of inner and outer. Still, in our era, though, when personal beauty counts for so much and drives so much of the movie and music industries, there is some resonance here.
Whether the Wildean opposition of art versus life “reads” to a present-day audience is not so certain. We’re not as obsessed with art as the post-Romantics were, and, anyway, we have reality TV and the like to blur the boundaries for us, not to mention electronic media such as Facebook that allow for a degree of self-invention and self-presentation that Wilde could only have goggled at.
Moreover, the Wilde-Wotton gospel of self-gratification before social and moral responsibility is surely moot at a time when the values of individualism and consumerism are triumphant — at least in the kind of society likely to be watching Dorian Gray. I don’t think it will be on many screens in Tehran or Riyadh.
There are strong, provocative themes in the Dorian story, but Parker’s film (built on Toby Finlay’s script) doesn’t really push them very far or find ways of relating them more sharply to the 21st century. It seems content to go for the horror-thriller elements instead of the thematics, and to encase it all in a period corset. Maybe that’s necessary to make sense of the aestheticism debate and all that; it does make the film seem a little remote.
Perhaps Parker should have tried updating the tale to the present, but then Will Self did that in his novel Dorian (bringing in video art and Aids), but it wasn’t entirely successful. Parker does at least make explicit some of the homoerotic undercurrent of Wilde’s novel. He might have tried, too, to make more obvious the edgy pleasures Dorian so craves — and to see how shocking they are nowadays.
Firth and Chaplin, at least, are excellent in their roles in the film. Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian in the Narnia movies) has the looks to be Dorian, but I didn’t get much emotional thrust from him. I suppose that’s hard when you’re becoming ever more corrupted while your face still looks innocently youthful. His Dorian is something of a blank, an empty space, and the film is more of a good-looking melodrama than an exploration of what is really to be seen in those portraits, even self-portraits, we keep locked away in our attics and basements.