06/19/98
MOVIE REVIEW: Wilde
An overpolite look at the difficulties of being Wilde

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

*** (out of five)
Starring Stephen Fry, Jude Law, Vanessa Redgrave, Jennifer Ehle, Gemma Jones, Tom Wilkinson. A Sony Pictures Classics release written by Julian Mitchell from the book Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann, directed by Brian Gilbert. Rated R, contains sexual situations, nudity, profanity, adult themes. Running time: 116 minutes.

Oscar Wilde was a huge, witty, overwhelming, flamboyant man and colorful writer whose books -- The Picture of Dorian Gray -- and plays -- The Importance of Being Earnest -- were hailed universally.

A seemingly happily married man with two children, he was sunk by his emotions when he fell in love with a handsome young nobleman. The resulting affair surrounding "the love that dare not speak its name," as Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas called it in a poem, became a major scandal at the end of the Victorian era. It left Wilde humiliated, heaped with scorn and imprisoned for two years at hard labor.

Stephen Fry makes a wonderful looking bon vivant-ish Oscar Wilde in Wilde, Brian Gilbert's screen biography of the man and the events. Yet the film itself seems a little too mannered and stodgy, a big-screen Masterpiece Theater production.

Where's the passion? Gilbert's camera keeps pulling back from the passionate moments of this passionate man as though it didn't want to offend audiences, the way Wilde himself tries to pussyfoot at his trial around what really happened between him and his lover. But movies that tread into touchy areas should shake one up.

Certainly Wilde shook up his Victorian contemporaries; he liked to think of himself as a paragon of cutting-edge individualism. He was cutting-edge in his flair for dressing, a hulking dandy in shoulder-length hair who, as played by Fry from the rear anyway, never failed to remind me of Rosie O'Donnell.

Pitted against the small and slender Jude Law, who plays Lord Douglas and is playfully nicknamed "Bosie," they appear to be doing a scene from My Giant.

Blinded by Bosie

I suppose Bosie fell in love with Wilde's celebrity and wit and gentleness, though mainly his celebrity. Bosie liked to go into restaurants with Wilde and position himself to be the center of attention.

Wilde fell in love with Bosie's porcelain pretty-boy looks, one assumes, as well as with the attentions he won from younger, handsomer man. "Beauty, breeding and youth," Wilde says, in listing Bosie's charms.

It couldn't have been Bosie's inner self. Law makes Bosie a preening, self-centered, conceited, petulant, nasty figure. Unfortunately, Wilde appears to be a blinded fool for falling in love with this little twit, and so our sympathies are not totally with him until the end, when he is a broken man.

Their relationship on screen is fairly surface, few of the characters having been developed fully enough for us to figure out why Wilde treated his loving wife (Jennifer Ehle) so badly, nor why she stuck around so long, nor even what her reaction was to the news that he was having an extramarital homosexual affair. It's all very mannered.

Wilde tackles the hypocrisies of the Victorian era square on, however, brought to life mainly in the character of Bosie's gruff, unloving father, the Marquis of Queensberry (yes, the guy who invented the rules for boxing, played by Tom Wilkinson).

And it presents a side of history and of an era that one might not have expected. The film opens in Leadville, Colo., in 1882 where the internationally renowned Wilde -- "famous for being himself" -- has been imported to give a lecture deep in a silver mine to a group of rapt miners.

Fry captures the larger-than-life sense of Wilde who says, "I do need an audience," and who was always in the public eye. He's dashing and vibrant and quick-witted.

But it's not until the last 20 minutes of the film, when he's trying to put a nicer spin on the probing questions at his trial and is sentenced, that the enormity of the injustice Wilde faced makes him a character who wins our empathy as well as our smiles.