Film ReviewTame treatment of a daring, defiant artist

By Michael Gray

WILDE, based on the biography by Richard Ellman. Starring Stephen Fry, Jude Law and Vanessa Redgrave. Directed by Brian Gilbert. Sony Classics (limited release).

As we approach the centenary of his death, Irish author and playwright Oscar Wilde is remembered more as a victim of the intolerance of his time than for his literary achievements. The perception of Wilde as a social satirist, and a modernizing force in the theater of late Victorian England, takes second place to his role as a gay martyr, sent to any early grave by hardships suffered in jail for offenses related to private behavior that is now legal.

But search a little deeper, and a more complex Oscar emerges from the shadow of this pale icon. Wilde, a witty aphorist, was a brilliant Trinity College and Oxford student, and the son of an eccentric mother of Unionist stock who was by times a fervent Irish nationalist. He flirted with Freemasonry and Catholicism, once had a private audience with the Pope, was engaged briefly to a woman who later married Bram Stoker, and was a family man of sorts with a wife and two kids.

Brian Gilbert’s new film, “Wilde,” strives to show a little more of this real Oscar, but not too much. Based on the definitive biography of Wilde, by the distinguished literary biographer, Richard Ellman, and starring Stephen Fry in the title role, the film has a seriousness of tone that underplays the flamboyance for which Wilde was renowned, and would probably appall the subject to see such a joyless portrayal of himself. While the film does address his rarely mentioned family life with his wife and their children, the main thrust of “Wilde” is his homosexual affair with the notorious Lord Alfred Douglas (Jude Law), and the trouble it brought him when he went to trial in 1895. This is ground well covered elsewhere, and this reverent treatment of Wilde tells us little that we didn’t know already. “Wilde” serves more as a respectful ode to the writer rather than a celebration of the wit and courage that characterized his life.

The film gets off to a promising start with an engaging scene in a Colorado silver mine in 1882, and immediately establishes Oscar’s credentials as a charming and erudite man well versed in the classics.

He delivers a lecture on Renaissance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini to a group of uninterested young miners in the caverns where they work, and wins them over with his humor and lack of condescension. But the director immediately cashes in his chips from this winning opening, to return to London and a standard depiction of stuffy society, to observe Wilde conform. Wilde marries Constance Lloyd, whom he admires for her silence, and becomes a father. The film slowly plods through his growing fascination with young men, and his gradual desertion of his family in the fatal pursuit of Lord Alfred Douglas. This pursuit is portrayed not with reckless abandon, but with a restraint and a spinsterly fussing that makes Oscar seem more pitiful and pathetic than daring and defiant.

In contrast with this restraint, the promiscuity of Wilde’s circle is matter-of-factly displayed. Throughout the film, the love that dare not speak its name practically shouts at you from across the room, out and proud, until the criminal justice system catches up on Wilde’s friends and they all run for cover abroad. With the exception of Wilde, who bravely stood his ground (his mother threatened that she would never speak to him again if he fled) to defend his lifestyle in court against charges of gross indecency.

Fry bears a strong physical resemblance to Wilde in a dandy doughboy sort of way, and plays the role with genuine grace and decorum. But he fails to convey the conflicting sides of an Irish charmer who was inclined toward annoying overconfidence, and a down-at-heel snob who desperately wanted to be accepted by London’s idle rich even as he savagely assailed them in their salons and on the West End stage.

Fry portrays Wilde as a wilted flower, his creative powers and exuberance sapped by his devotion to the selfish hedonist Lord Alfred Douglas. But at least he fares better than Vanessa Redgrave, who deserves special reprimand for her cartoonish efforts as Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde. Better known as Speranza, the nom de plume she used when writing pro-nationalist Irish poetry, Lady Wilde cut quite an eccentric figure in the social scenes of Dublin and London, and was the likely role model for the sarcastic matrons that spiced “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan.”

With Speranza’s lavish turbans and enormous jewelry, nothing could be easier for an actress than sliding into caricature, a descent that Redgrave, who should know better, can’t resist. Her top o’ the mornin’ accent couldn’t be further removed from the Merrion Square that was Lady Wilde’s social milieu during Oscar’s

childhood in Dublin.

Speranza was as quick with the quotable quote as her more famous son. Once, when asked to receive a visitor whom a friend had described as “respectable,” she forbade her friend to employ that description in her house, saying “only tradespeople are respectable.” This reverent film of her son’s life courts respectability as vigorously as she defied it, and is at best a languid journeyman effort that fails to reach the synthesis of art and life to which Wilde himself always aspired.

To read a review of the Off-Broadway play “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” click here.

To read a review of “The Judas Kiss,” click here.

To read more about Oscar Wilde, click here.