Wilde Reviews
Now here’s a bargain: three reputations salvaged for the price of one. Stephen Fry — hitherto best known for not appearing on stage and not having sex — proves he really can act, bringing a remarkable depth and sensitivity to the role some would say he was born to play. Brian Gilbert, who’s proven equally adept at making rotten formula flicks (‘Vice Versa’) and rotten British costume dramas (‘Tom and Viv’) demonstrates impressive confidence with a decent budget and high-powered cast. And perhaps best of all, Jude Law, whose career once seemed unlikely to survive the debacle of ‘Shopping’ — the worst of those feeble pre-‘Trainspotting’ attempts to contrive hip flicks for "the kids" — portrays the dissolute, self-centred Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas with such magnificent petulance that he practically steals the whole thing from under the nose of the film’s nominal star. Fine performances apart, what elevates this above the standard of tasteful heritage drama is Julian Mitchell’s witty, literate script that draws on, but also dares to extrapolate from, Richard Ellman’s masterly biography. The conventional ‘rise and fall’ biopic arc is boosted by the audacious device of using extracts from Wilde’s achingly sad ‘The Selfish Giant’ as a running commentary on his relationship with his wife and children as the toast of Victorian luvvies buggers his way across London with Bosie and his rent-boy chums. Equally powerful is the arresting prologue, which has an admiring Oscar lowered regally into a Colorado silver mine to deliver a paternal, epigrammatic lecture on Renaissance cutlery to the entranced, muscular, semi-naked toilers below. Metaphors? We gottem! The most emotionally charged scenes involve Oscar’s encounters with Bosie’s father, the monstrous Marquess of Queensberry (Wilkinson), whose illiteracy, the film encourages us to believe, is at least as offensive as his violence and bigotry. If ‘Wilde’ has a fault, it is perhaps in whisking Oscar from the triumph of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ to the misery of Reading gaol without imparting any real sense of the prevailing homophobia that sealed his fate, which could leave more enlightened contemporary audiences wondering what all the fuss was about.
Alexander Walker - Evening Standard ( 10 June 1997-10-23 )
"Stephen Fry's Oscar winning performance"
October 16, the date of Oscar Wilde's birth 143 years ago, has been chosen for the West End premiere of the new film about the poet, playwright and homosexual martyr to Victorian moral values and English social hypocrisy. But well before then, the long-awaited movie Wilde, which has just had its first screening privately in London, will have set the town talking.
Two things can be said immediately about people's reaction. Marc Samuelson's sumptuous period production, written by Julian Mitchell and directed by Brian Gilbert, provides us with rehabilitation and a revelation. The rehabilitation is that of Stephen Fry. The truant stage actor here returns to the top of the class with a dominating screen performance. His Oscar Wilde is the emotional and intellectual ballast in the story of a man who has the world at his command, but whose tragedy is his inability to command himself.
The revelation that the film offers is Fry's co-star Jude Law, playing Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's amour fatal and the nemesis who provokes his lover into mounting the ill-fated libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, Douglas's father, that rebounds and leads to the two years' hard labour passed on Wilde for sodomy.The film ties this pair of players together in a love knot that eventually comes to resemble a suicide noose for one of them.
Fry's presence is monumental. Visibly pounds heavier, with a jawline like the proud prow of a ship, his hair waved and worn insolently longer than even contemporary photographs record, Fry's Wilde is a credible combination of physical strength and moral weakness. No languid fop popping with epigrams, or sounding like a one-man show entitled The Wit and Folly of Oscar Wilde, he is recognisably a man of the period and carries total conviction.
The movie opens with brilliant unexpectedness. We expect to see rough trade on the West End pavements. Instead we get rough-riders on horseback, firing guns and whooping it up at the gallop in the Wild West. You couldn't have invented a better calling card for this British production's reception in America - or a more accurate one. For in 1882 Wilde visited Colorado on a speaking tour of the US and went down a silver mine to baptise the precious seam named after him and tell the miners: "I hope to collect the royalties".
Fry charms these hairy toilers and casts an appreciative eye over the near naked, more personable younger ones while lecturing them on Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance artist in previous metals whose sideline probably included several murders. "Did he shoot 'em?" one son of Silverado eagerly enquires.
Kevin Thomas - Los Angeles Times ( 1 May 1998 )
"Full-Blooded 'Wilde' Offers Definitive Portrait of Oscar"
"Wilde" has found a perfect Oscar in the formidably talented Stephen Fry, who brings an uncanny physical resemblance to the Victorian playwright along with a profound grasp of the great wit's psyche.
Coupled with Julian Mitchell's superb script, drawn from Richard Ellmann's landmark biography, and director Brian Gilbert's total commitment to it and to his sterling cast, this deeply moving "Wilde" is likely to remain the definitive screen treatment of Oscar Wilde for years to come. At the same time "Wilde" is a lustrous period piece with a high degree of authenticity in decor and costume.
Fry's Wilde is a big, tall, Irishman with a daunting jaw, large, sensitive eyes and a kindly manner. There is a certain softness within this great looming presence. This Wilde is clearly a brilliant intellectual, a master of paradox who in his all-too-short life would turn some of the most felicitous phrases in the English language. The great thing about this Wilde is that, as beautifully spoken as he is, he does not drip with bon mots every time he opens his mouth. Surely, Wilde didn't speak in epigrams all the time, any more than Dorothy Parker did.
In an inspired opening sequence, we meet Wilde on his famous 1882 American speaking tour. He's just arrived in Leadville, Colo., where he's visiting the Matchless silver mine, (the very one, it would seem, where another celebrated Victorian-era casualty, the once-rich and beautiful Baby Doe Tabor, was found frozen to death in 1935). Once down inside the mine, Wilde is as clearly captivated by the young miners' bare chests as they are about his well-spun tale about the great Renaissance silversmith Benevuto Cellini.
But as Wilde has yet to confront his true sexual nature, he marries and sires two sons, as is expected of him. He loves his wife, Constance (Jennifer Ehle), but his eye keeps roving until at last he's seduced by a young Canadian, Robbie Ross (Michael Sheen), who will be only a passing sexual fancy but remain his staunchest friend.
On the opening night of his play "Lady Windemere's Fan" Wilde is reintroduced to the young Lord Alfred Douglas (Jude Law), whom he had met briefly the year before. He is transfixed by this gilded but deeply troubled youth of the Gilded Age. Lord Alfred, known as Bosie, has the misfortune to be the son of a brutal homophobic tyrant, the marquis of Queensbury (Tom Wilkinson, the boss of the laid-off workers in "The Full Monty").
"Wilde" is above all a love story, and a classic one at that. Here's a man, not unattractive but a bit ungainly, who's hit the threshold of dazzling acclaim and who falls hard for a beautiful young man who's been alternately spoiled and beaten but never loved by his parents. Of course their physical relationship is fleeting, lasting just long enough for Bosie to become the love of Oscar's life - even if it is ultimately to cost Wilde his life.
One of the many strengths of this film is that it gives us a full-dimensioned portrait of the mercurial Bosie, who could be outrageously petulant, cruel and shamelessly exploitative but was intelligent enough to appreciate Wilde's talent (and thereby envy it).
When Wilde surmises that Bosie loves him as much as he could be capable of loving anyone, you suspect he's right. There's another love story too, between Oscar and the devoted, ultimately understanding Constance; in the end Wilde feels great remorse for what he has put his wife and sons through, to the extent that they must change their names and flee the country.
Derek Elley - Variety (25-31 August 1997)
"Wilde life makes for artful pic"
Big, bold and burnished - "Wilde", is the full Monty on Oscar. Toplining British comedian/wit Stephen Fry in a once-in-a-lifetime role as the brilliant, acerbic playwright, and mounted with a care and affection in all departments that squeezes the most from its $10 million budget, movie is a tony biopic that manages to combine an up front portrayal of the scribe's gayness with an often moving examination of his brooder emotions and artistic ideals. With a good marketing push and critical backing, this offbeat costumer could reap warm rewards as a midstream item, with its appeal cleverly positioned across the sexual spectrum.
Aside from the considerable presence of Wilde look-alike Fry - who has admitted in interviews he was probably born for the part - pic is the first to go the whole enchilada on Wilde's homosexuality, with reasonably forthright, though far from full-frontal, sex scenes replacing the lingering looks by Peter Finch and Robert Morley, respectively in the two 1960 versions, "The Trials of Oscar Wilde" and "Oscar Wilde".
Achievement of the current pic, however, is that it is far from just in-your-face '90s version of the story: Julian Mitchell's script, from the revealing biography by Richard Ellman, equally addresses Wilde's love for his children, the nervousness behind his outward courage as a convention-breaker, as well as his higher, Platonic ideals of beauty and youth. In that respect, there's something for everyone, especially in the handsome wide-screen mounting it gets here.
The signals that this is going to be more than your average Brit. costumer are visible from the outset: Pic opens like an Anthony Mann Western in the mining community of Leadville, Color., in 1882, in the midst of Wilde's yearlong lecture tour of the U.S. and Canada. Incongruous sight of the lumbering writer in the Wild West, where he flirtatiously lectures bare-chested young miners on Socratic Ideals, is a marvellous introduction to Fry's sardonic but sad portrait.
Invigorated by his Stateside experience and still not confronting his sexuality, Wilde marries the beautiful and adoring Constance (Jennifer Ehle, from "Pride and Prejudice"), by whom he has two sons. It's only with the arrival of a gay Canadian house guest, Robbie Ross (Michael Sheen), that Wilde opens the dam of his homosexuality: While Constance is putting their sprig to bed upstairs, Robbie calmly drops his pants in front of Oscar in the drawing room.
As Wilde's career blossoms along with his catalogue of boyfriends, smart Victorian society starts rumbling with innuendoes about the playwright's proclivities. On the more bohemian reaches, however, Wilde is supported by his Irish mom (Vanessa Redgrave) and broadminded friend Ada (Zoe Wanamaker).
Then, to the chagrin of Robbie and others, at the triumphant opening night party of "Lady Windermere's Fan". Wilde is introduced to the upper-crust Alfred (Bosie) Douglas (Jude Law) and falls head over heels for the beauteous, attention-seeking young poet, who insists on publicly parading their affection, as a rebuff to polite society and to his brutish, homophobic father, the Marquess of Queensberry (Tom Wilkinson).
It's here that Fry's perf really kicks in, beyond spouting Wilde's famously witty bon mots. Behind the man's overweening arrogance lies a real sadness that his affection for the kamikaze-like Bosie, prone to childish tantrums and sexual philandering, is to be the vehicle for his eventual downfall. But Wilde persists in the relationship, even as the gruff Queensberry becomes more aggressive in his insults and warnings to Wilde to drop Bosie, and Wilde's friends point out that Bosie is sapping his creative energies. The result is a trial and Wilde's imprisonment.
Brian Gilbert, till now only a journeyman director, brings to the picture most of the qualities that were memorably absent in his previous costumer, "Tom & Viv" - visual fluency, deep-seated emotion and first rate playing from his cast. Aside from Fry, up-and-coming young actor Law (looking remarkably like John Fraser in the 1960 Finch version) makes an alternately likeable and infuriating Bosie. Equally strong, and providing a solid arc of friendship across Oscar's travails, is Sheen as Robbie.
Though she's on the margins of the story for much of the time, Ehle is excellent as Constance, giving quiet substance to a potentially token role. She comes through especially strongly in the pic's most moving scene, a heart-to-heart between Oscar and Constance in Reading Gaol. As the most brutish and out-spoken screen Queensberry to date, Wilkinson is also first-rate. Wanamaker, Redgrave and Judy Parfitt contribute solid extended cameos.
Film is handsomely appointed, from Debbie Wiseman's supportive orchestral score (with a soupcon of "Basic Instinct" in its main theme), through Nic Ede's lived-in costumers, to Maria Djurkovic's clever production design that gives pic a look way beyond its budget. Martin Fuhrer's autumnal widescreen lensing ensures movie never has a Brit telepic feel.
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