Importance of Wilde’s downfall a high for Everett
A generation of once young, once beautiful male actors is growing old, and while one or two may have fallen by the wayside, others are embracing middle age and the opportunities it offers with a renewed vigour. Hugh Grant has never been better, Colin Firth is an Oscarwinner and now Rupert Everett has made the film of his career.
The Happy Prince (15A) is a heartbreaking gem.This is the story of Oscar Wilde after he was released from prison in 1897, having served a two-year sentence for homosexual offences.
Ostracised, stigmatised, flat broke and with his looks long gone, Wilde (played superbly by Everett, who also directs and writes) cuts a pathetic figure in fin-de-siècle France. He’s still obsessed with Lord Alfred Douglas – or Bosie, as he calls the vain young lover at least partially responsible for his downfall – and is totally dependent on the goodwill of a small handful of remaining friends, including the journalist and critic Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas) and writer Reggie Turner (Firth).
There’s so much to admire here. Everett has wrung every last penny out of a modest budget to evoke an enjoyably convincing sense of period and place. I love that Wilde spends much of the film speaking fluent French with a British accent and, be warned, Everett’s approach to the indignities of dying are similarly uncompromising but wholly admirable too.
But it works on another, almost Proustian level. The sudden appearance of Firth – a
firm friend since they both appeared in The Importance Of
Being Earnest in 2002 – in the sort of supporting role he ordinarily wouldn’t look twice at is immensely touching; doubly so once you discover it was Firth’s presence alone that got the film financed.
For while this may be a film about how Wilde’s life – and genius – were cruelly curtailed by the stigma of his homosexuality, it’s also about lives lived, enduring friendships and the relentless passing of time.
Hereditary (16) which I caught up with at the recent Sundance London Film Festival, arrives in cinemas with a lot of horror heat behind it. Could it do for the genre, as some have claimed, what the likes of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity once did? Short answer – no, as the sighs of disappointment around me, greeting the closing credits, made clear.
As a child of the disco era, I absolutely loved Studio 54 (15A)
, a fascinating and rather moving documentary about the short-lived New York nightclub that briefly became the epitome of glamorous hedonism at the end of the Seventies. The story is both better and worse than I was expecting but if I ever stumble across a time machine, that’s still where I’m heading first.