Tender study of Oscar Wilde’s last years
The Happy Prince 15 cert, 145 min
Dir Rupert Everett Starring Rupert Everett, Colin Morgan, Colin Firth, Emily Watson, Edwin Thomas, Tom Wilkinson, Béatrice Dalle, Julian Wadham, Anna Chancellor
Oscar Wilde ended his days lost in a miasma of bankruptcy, public infamy and viral agony, never returning to Britain after his release from Reading Gaol, but exiled to the Continent. Bravely, it’s this period that Rupert Everett has chosen to focus on for his directorial debut, The Happy Prince, letting him expand on his celebrated performance in the 2012 West End revival of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss.
Everett has danced around the role of Wilde throughout his career, notably as the idle bachelors Oscar wrote in An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, both plays landing on screen during the peak Miramax era as a pair of nattily cast Oliver Parker divertissements. But it’s here that the writerdirector-star truly gets to grips with the grisly decay of the author’s life, sparing us nothing as he plunges into a destitute purgatory. With only brief upward glances at Wilde’s faded star as the one-time toast of London society, these are very much the gutter years.
Physically, Everett is a long way from the louche-but-dapper figure he cut a decade or two ago. Jowly and lumbering, mush-faced under prosthetics, his Wilde is on a fast track to oblivion, frittering his last centimes on pleasures of the flesh. The legendary wit flickers here and there, but ruin is written all over him, and creatively he’s a spent force.
First announced in 2012, The Happy Prince has evidently been a passion project for Everett, difficult to fund in the intervening years, and part of its wobbly technique can be put down to strenuous labour. But there are real virtues to its comparative lack of polish: this story gains a seamy power from the rough edges. Everett summons the shade of Visconti’s Death in Venice, when Wilde hides from his persecutors at a French seaside resort. But there’s much that suggests an influence closer to home: the acrid and challenging work of John Maybury, especially his 1998 Francis Bacon biopic Love is the Devil.
The supporting cast aid the cause. Everett’s old cohort Colin Firth, as his loyal friend Reggie Turner, and Edwin Thomas as his literary executor Robbie Ross, are admittedly way too far apart in age to play these exact contemporaries: Firth’s mainly here to be a sellable name, not a convincing 28-year-old, but such is life.
A bleached-blond Colin Morgan, meanwhile, has the just right sort of Caravaggio pulchritude to play Bosie, with whom Wilde was briefly but tempestuously reunited before his final descent. Better yet is young French actor Benjamin Voisin, outstanding in the presumably composite role of street urchin Jean. Emily Watson, typically thoughtful as Oscar’s wife Constance, doesn’t get quite the screen time Jennifer Ehle had in 1997’s Wilde, but given the couple’s separation at this stage, it’s hardly surprising.
In that more sanitised film, Tom Wilkinson played Wilde’s nemesis, the Marquess of Queensbury. Funnily enough, he turns up with a small role here, serving the exact opposite function: he’s the Irish priest who forgivingly ministered on Wilde’s deathbed.
Everett overdoes the lachrymosity at the end, the one part of the film where a more subdued rigour would have served him better. At the very least, though, it’s a command performance, an uncompromising feat of empathy in the role that he’s made his own more than any other.