Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Wilde (1997)
Director: Brian Gilbert
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
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. Gilbert's film, with an intelligent screenplay by Julian Mitchell based on Richard Ellmann's biography, looks curiously old-fashioned. More lavish than Merchant Ivory, it's a '60s-style Technicolor affair with a grown-up '90s feel. 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. 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. He speaks the witty lines as if he invented them and manages to square Wilde's weakness and arrogance with his immense generosity of spirit, while his prison cell reunion with dying wife Constance (Ehle) would make a traffic warden cry. The cast oozes real class: Redgrave is superb as Wilde's tigerish Irish mother; Wilkinson suitably revolting as Queensberry; Sheen perfect as Ross; and Law explosively arresting as the capricious, finally destructive Douglas.Author: SGr
Cast & crew
Director: Brian Gilbert
Producer: Marc Samuelson, Peter Samuelson
Cast: Stephen Fry, Jude Law, Vanessa Redgrave, Jennifer Ehle, Gemma Jones, Judy Parfitt, Michael Sheen, Zoë Wanamaker, Tom Wilkinson, Peter Barkworth full cast
Genre(s): Period/Swashbucklers
Duration: 117 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
To the letter
Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.
Mind over matter
David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.
Fool's gold
Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.
We are the championed
Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."
A history of violence
Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.
True romantic
James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.
Playing in the dark
MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.
Junk bonds
Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.
What do you think?
Post your review now