![]() As Wilde, descending from would-be-doting husband and father to follower of his own 'nature', and finally ruined and disgraced martyr on the tree of English hypocrisy, Fry is utterly convincing. Unlike its predecessors, it's able to be frank about the sexual encounters: with devoted friend Robbie Ross with rent boys to whom Wilde was indulgently generous and, fatefully, with the love of his life, the beautiful, wilful, spoilt brat Lord Alfred ('Bosie') Douglas, who didn't fancy Wilde, but saw him as the alternative father to his brutal, bullying pater, the Marquess of Queensberry. More lavish than Merchant Ivory, it's a '60s-style Technicolor affair with a grown-up '90s feel. Gilbert's film, with an intelligent screenplay by Julian Mitchell based on Richard Ellmann's biography, looks curiously old-fashioned. ![]() If anybody was born to play Oscar Wilde, it must have been Stephen Fry: not only does he look like the Green Carnation Man, but he himself is often portrayed as being too clever, too complex for his own good.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |