When I first saw the announcement of this latest attempt to take Victorian literature on to the modern big screen flashing by on a bus, my only thought was “hmm, Ben Barnes as the eternally handsome and youthful Dorian Gray – that’s good casting!” But I wasn’t really interested in going to see it, even when I heard that Colin Firth would be playing the dashing bad influence of Henry Wotton – who for some reason is called Harry in the film adaptation.
So, feeling pretty neutral about the whole thing, I entered the cinema looking forward to two hours of handsome-men-admiring and perhaps something to talk to my fellow English students about the next time we mentioned Oscar Wilde, at best. And I, sort of, got what I expected. It was, in short, a unique kind of disaster. Not a bad film per se, just a bad take on a literary classic. As with most modern takes on Wilde, all the subtlety has been removed and the homoerotic element is played to the hilt. Whether this is how I think Wilde meant us to interpret his text is a discours I will save for my seminars, but let just say that this screenwriter clearly believed he did.
Of course, a large part of the book’s charm is the phsycological element; getting to slowly witness Dorian’s descent into madness as his picture ages and withers and he doesn’t. Parts of this came across very well in the film, but obviously it wasn’t sustainable for two hours – the time was filled in with an extra character and plot twist (Dorian falls for Lord Harry’s daughter) and a LOT of gratuitous sex scenes. And when I say a lot, I mean bordering on soft porn at times – I know that it’s all about the effects of opium and being a forever virile playboy who cannot scar, but really… (Not one to take the parents to guys, unless you want a few awkward glances, and that’s not something you’d expect given the source material.)
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised – after all, Victorian novels are hardly making the best seller lists, nor are they particularly fast paced or racy. But is so much sex, drugs and rock & roll necessary Did the portrait really have to take on a life of its own, like a bad slasher movie villain, to convey what was happening to an audience who might not have picked up on the premise? And, why not give poor artist Basil, who barely appeared in this version except to paint Dorian and die by his hands later, a little more screen time instead?
Perhaps as a Lit student who has read the book in depth, this film was ruined for me from the start due to my perspective. Maybe other people can appreciate it as an individual movie rather than an adaptation, but personally I just kept comparing it to the original. And, while Ben Barnes was fantastic as Dorian and beautiful throughout and I can’t fault Colin’s acting one bit, I was very disappointed by the age spots, bad hairdo and truly awful handlebar moustache he sported for most of the film!
Laura Patricia is the editor of the Pugwash News and the Editor of Pugwash Magazine and Pugwash online.
