There is a scene in a restaurant where the two men smoke, smile and hold hands, while all of London seems to look on. He might have settled into an existence of discreet bisexuality had it not been for his meeting, some years later, the beautiful young Lord Alfred Douglas ( Jude Law), known as "Bosie," who was, if Wilde had only realized it, more interested in his fame than his body.īosie liked to flirt and flaunt. But when a young Canadian house guest named Robbie ( Michael Sheen) boldly approached him in the parlor late one night, Wilde responded.
#Oscar wilde films movie
He loved his children, and the movie uses one of his children's stories as a counterpoint.
#Oscar wilde films full
(The film opens with him down in a silver mine in Nevada, reading poetry to the miners and beaming upon their muscular torsos.) He invented the type exploited later by Elvis Presley: the peacock in full plumage, kidding himself.īorn in Dublin, he came out of Ireland more or less expecting to behave as a heterosexual, and was sincere in his marriage to Constance ( Jennifer Ehle). Wilde was the dandy as superstar in the years before mass media, he wrote best sellers and long-running plays, and went on enormously popular lecture tours. That he is also a fine actor is important, because the film requires him to show many conflicting aspects of Wilde's life: how he loved his wife and children, how his homosexuality was oriented not so much toward the physical as toward the idealistic, and how he was so successful for so long in charming everyone in his life that he actually believed he could charm an English courtroom out of a sentence for sodomy. With immense self-enjoyment, he punctured hypocrisy ("I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do").īrian Gilbert's "Wilde," with a screenplay by Julian Mitchell, based on Richard Ellmann's famous biography, has the good fortune to star Stephen Fry, a British author, actor and comedian who looks a lot like Wilde and has many of the same attributes: He is very tall, he is somewhat plump, he is gay, he is funny and he makes his conversation into an art. ("Earnest," for example, was in Wilde's time a synonym for "gay.") Wilde was famous for his quips and one-liners, which survive because they almost always contain a center of truth. Many of the people in his audiences understood what he was writing between the lines, but accepted it as funny and daring-as long as it stayed between the lines. In another sense, Wilde's genius required a backdrop of Victorian stuffiness. And dashedly bad luck that the marquess' attorneys were able to produce in court "rent boys" from a male brothel, who testified that the marquess was correct in describing Wilde as a sodomite.Ĭonsider that a century later gay men are being knighted, and you see what bad timing it was to be born in 1854.
Still worse luck that when the marquess left an insulting message at Wilde's club, Wilde unwisely sued him. Worse luck that the father was the Marquess of Queensberry, a famous figure in boxing and horse racing.
It was Wilde's misfortune to fall in love with a reckless and vain young man who hated his pigheaded father, and wanted to use Wilde's fame as a taunt. Homosexual behavior was, after all, against the law. There were no doubt as many homosexuals in Wilde's day as there are now, but most of them either repressed their feelings or kept them secret. Wilde's personal tragedy would be of little lasting interest were it not for the enduring popularity of his work and the sensational nature of his fall.
0 kommentar(er)
