by Oliver Parker, 2002.
Starring Judi Dench, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Anna Massey, Frances O’Connor, Tom Wilkinson, Reese Witherspoon.
Rating: 9/10, 7/10.
WARNING: This is a very badly written review. I apologize.
Three years ago, in 1999, Oliver Parker directed the film version of Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband, starring Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, Rupert Everett, and Minnie Driver, and did a deliriously wonderful job of it. He seems to have a knack for it, as we can see with his new film version of Wilde’s Importance Of Being Earnest. He and his crew have brought the perfect touch to every element—the casting, for example, in both films was inspired (who would have expected Minnie Driver, or Reese Witherspoon?—but of course both ended up being perfect). I was going to go on, but that would get boring. Anyway, The Importance Of Being Earnest was great. I would say not nearly as great as An Ideal Husband, but even so it’s guaranteed itself a spot on my favorite movies of 2002 list.
As many have pointed out, the plots of Oscar Wilde plays tend to be excuses on which to hang clever dialogue. This is true, which makes it even funnier how complicated these plots are. This one involved one man named Jack (Firth) who calls himself Ernest while in the city for his own reasons, and another named Algy (Everett) who, on a visit to the country takes on the name Ernest himself, again for his own reasons. Also involved are a sexually repressed tutor named, oddly, Miss Prism (Massey, in perhaps the film’s greatest performance), who is in love with the local minister, Dr. Chasuble, (Wilkinson), who loves her back, obsessively and nervously. And then there are the love interests, these being Jack’s beloved Gwendolyn (O’Connor), who thinks his name is Ernest and will not marry anyone with a different name, and Algy’s Cecily (Witherspoon), who, funnily enough, thinks HIS name is Ernest and feels the same way about the name as does Gwendolyn. We also have the inevitable breakdown of the barrier between the male characters’ city and country worlds, with, naturally enough, wacky results. And there’s still more: Gwendolyn’s strict mother Lady Bracknell (Dench) who refuses to grant her hand in marriage to Jack; babies left in handbags at railway stations; pianos played, guitars strummed, and songs sung; and attempted re-christenings.
I’ve heard expressions of disappointment from some viewers of this film, all of them being people who know the original play. I must admit, the only Wilde I’ve ever read was The Portrait Of Dorian Gray, and that was quite some time ago. Regardless, here’s the way I see it: people seem to be dissatisfied with this film because it’s not a strict interpretation of the play (or at least that’s my impression of what people say the problem is), to which I say, what a silly reason not to like something. When a movie is based on an earlier work—a play, novel, story, whatever—it is exceedingly unfair to judge the movie based on how faithful it is to the source material. View them as two related but separate works, and the problem vanishes. Judge the movie on its own merits. See? You like the movie better already!
Not to seem obsessed with the cast of this movie, but, well, I am. It was so strong, so perfect. Everett was on the top of his form, as usual, although am I the only person who has realized that the only time he plays straight men is in Oscar Wilde plays and, well, Ready To Wear, a movie about fashion? Anyway, from the opening sequence with him eluding the police (he has a lot of debts) while bangy piano music (the music, by Charlie Mole, is one of the many fabulous things you’ll find here) plays in the background—until we cut to him playing that music himself—to the end of the film, he is steadily perfect in the role of the Wildean loveable rake. O’Connor, last seen in 2000’s crapification of Bedazzled, redeems herself completely as Gwendolyn, whom I nearly described as devilishly proper before I caught myself. Then there’s Witherspoon, who, if you ask me, has a nearly unblemished film career (with the exceptions of Pleasantville, possibly the worst movie I have ever seen, and Little Nicky, which I have not seen), who considering her charm and general loveliness has much too small a role here. But I must give the biggest props to Judi Dench and Anna Massey. Dench plays Lady Bracknell as an imposing, fascinating woman with that particular blindness to and revulsion for the realities of life outside the upper classes that only one who came from outside of those classes can have. It’s a brilliant, if small, performance and, well, knowing her it’s quite long enough for an Oscar win. It is Massey’s Miss Prism, though, that sticks in my mind the most. Massey brings so much sadness and poignancy to what is essentially a comic relief character in a comedy that it comes as something of a shock that the character works at all. That it not only works, but succeeds fantastically, makes this certainly one of the very best performances of the year thus far. Massey knows how to do everything right, down to the subtlest inflections of speech and movement. Well, it seems that my most poorly written review in recent memory is also turning out to be one of the longest. I must apologize.