Books, Arts & Manners: A Past Past Escaping

THERE have been two previous films about Oscar Wilde. In the 1959 Oscar Wilde, Robert Morley re-created a stage performance, amusingly but without much charisma. In the 1960 The Trials of Oscar Wilde, Peter Finch was a superb Wilde and John Frazer a very fine Alfred Douglas. Neither film covered sufficient ground. Wilde, written by the gifted Julian Mitchell and directed by Brian Gilbert, whose Tom and Viv (about T. S. Eliot) was less than compelling, tries to go farther and deeper, but doesn’t quite come off, either.

There is an unfortunate Masterpiece Theatre aura about Wilde, which, it must be conceded, would have been hard to avoid. Put some fine English actors into lavish costumes and opulent settings, photograph them resplendently, and what else will you get? Of course, this story is more somber and seedy, but it is also illumined by Wilde’s charm and wit, and so that more or less balances out. The film shows some of Wilde’s sordid relations with servants and stable boys, and does not shy away from all-male sex scenes. Yet it tends to sentimentalize, not least by Stephen Fry’s rather too sweet and concerned Oscar, and it does not go into those wretched post-prison years of exile, poverty, drink, and degradation, leading to a pauper’s death at 46. All that is laconically summed up in a title card.

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John Simon

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THERE have been two previous films about Oscar Wilde. In the 1959 Oscar Wilde, Robert Morley re-created a stage performance, amusingly but without much charisma. In the 1960 The Trials of Oscar Wilde, Peter Finch was a superb Wilde and John Frazer a very fine Alfred Douglas. Neither film covered sufficient ground. Wilde, written by the gifted Julian Mitchell and directed by Brian Gilbert, whose Tom and Viv (about T. S. Eliot) was less than compelling, tries to go farther and deeper, but doesn’t quite come off, either.

There is an unfortunate Masterpiece Theatre aura about Wilde, which, it must be conceded, would have been hard to avoid. Put some fine English actors into lavish costumes and opulent settings, photograph them resplendently, and what else will you get? Of course, this story is more somber and seedy, but it is also illumined by Wilde’s charm and wit, and so that more or less balances out. The film shows some of Wilde’s sordid relations with servants and stable boys, and does not shy away from all-male sex scenes. Yet it tends to sentimentalize, not least by Stephen Fry’s rather too sweet and concerned Oscar, and it does not go into those wretched post-prison years of exile, poverty, drink, and degradation, leading to a pauper’s death at 46. All that is laconically summed up in a title card.