Earnest in exile

Fans of famed playwright will enjoy Rupert Everett’s directorial debut

“I’m in mortal combat with this wallpaper. One of us has to go.” These are the famous last words of Oscar Wilde — and like a lot of such quotations, it’s apocryphal.

He almost certainly said something like that, but it was weeks before his death in 1900, at which time he was insensible.

Rupert Everett knows that, and he places the line in its proper historical context in his sympathetic tribute to the British writer. The Happy Prince — the movie takes its title from one of Wilde’s beloved children’s stories — has been a passion project for the actor, who stars as Wilde and also gets his first writing and directing credits here.

Rather than try to encompass all of Wilde’s busy 46 years, Everett focuses on the final three, when that wallpaper really started to rankle. Wilde had been sentenced to two years’ hard labour for gross indecency (i.e., homosexuality) and after that, in the summer of ’97, he took up residence in France under the name Sebastian Melmoth.

His public had all but abandoned him, but he still had

friends with money, not least Lord Alfred Douglas (Colin Morgan) and British-canadian writer Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas), two former lovers whom Wilde is constantly playing off each other, telling each man that only the other ever really understood him.

Wilde’s circle also includes old friend Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) and, at greater remove, his wife, Constance (Emily Watson). He wanted to reconcile with her and his two sons — indeed, when he first arrives on French soil he seems to want to live a reformed life, as it was then understood. But in this telling Wilde is a tragic, helpless romantic.

Everett’s script is sweet but a little dry. Fans of Wilde should enjoy the treatment, although they may yearn for more of the writer’s early witticisms. Ultimately an earnest tale. And isn’t that what’s important?