Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's only published novel, receives a spirited treatment in cinemas currently. Dorian Gray didn't particularly strike me as a film that would appeal personally; the trailer suggested that the producers had traded in on striking good looks for vapid teenpleaser and on artistic depth for blockbuster-style impact. But my first impressions were somewhat misplaced.

Ben Barnes did admirably. His first appearance as a young Dorian arriving to the newly inherited family home in Victorian London was clumsy and a rather obvious attempt at 'innocence'. Similarly, his return from his travels of fifteen years to his friends now aged, towards the close of film, challenged Barnes to portray age and experience without actually aging himself. Here again I felt he lacked the gravitas fully to pull off such an attempt. However, despite his opening and closing scenes, in the main he provided a strong performance, impressing me most with the devilish twinkle in his eye as he slid into vice.

He was ably supported by Colin Firth and Ben Chaplin, who, as Henry and Basil, formed something of a devil-angel duo for Dorian's seduction into vice. They both performed excellently, and conveyed much in their exchanged glances of confusion as their creation started to exceed their limitations. Rachel Hurd-Wood as Dorian's first love, Sybil Vane, was sadly unremarkable, and too simpering for my taste. Rebecca Hall's surprise appearance towards the end of the film was also a bit of a disappointment. As Henry's daughter, a supposed change for Dorian's redemption, she performed well enough, but her lines were littered with comments about suffrage, the new-fangled camera and the future for women. It was too much of an attempt at modernising and contextualising Dorian's life and the changes in society to be palatable.

In fact, perhaps it was modernisation that was this film's undoing, or at least caused it to slip considerably in my estimation. The CGI effects for Dorian's portrait were feeble and the addition of groans and growls laughable. Where the novel charts Dorian's fall into vice as a three-dimensional quest for pleasure in all forms, through art, music, theatre and indeed a search for beauty, the film settled on raucous parties, deflowering of virgins and copious amounts of gin. It's true, Dorian does partake in all these things in the novel, but they are not the only things that blacken his soul. It was in this way that the film failed at the last post for me: it was successfully acted, musically and cinematically well put together, but in attempting to do something new it traded in on the beautiful nuances of the original to provide something racy and ultimately unfulfilling on the screen.

***

2009

Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, Ben Chaplin, Rebecca Hall, Rachel Hurd-Wood

Dir. Oliver Parker