Loading ...Dorian Gray review
To paraphrase Saint Oscar himself, it is absurd to divide films into good or bad; they’re simply either charming or tedious. Oliver Parker’s latest screen adaptation of England’s greatest wit’s only novel does indeed poisonously charm, by running wild – if not Wilde – with its inspiration’s fatally bewitching tale of the beautiful and the damned.
Firstly, the movie strikes a very en vogue pose: in our metrosexual age of male self-adoration, Dorian’s Faustian pact, promising eternal youth at the expense of a degenerating soul, reflects masculinity’s fatally alluring – and enduring – romance with its own mirror image. (Blame Team Beckham or the feminist wet dream?)
Furthermore, Parker’s revision is merely the newborn in a succession of dandyish bastard children spawned from the original: in an act of ultra-modern, homo-cloning, we’ve caroused with Will Self’s diseased, scurrilous imitation; Hollywood and BBC screen versions; and even Matthew Bourne’s ballet, in which Dorian, as the beautiful boy-as-destroyer, is transplanted to the haute couture fast-lane of modern fashion – an extended D&G underwear campaign juicily bursting with Nureyevan gestures and bulging crotches.
Re-located to the virtue and vice of Victorian London, Ben Barnes leads as the icily remote, self-possessed Dorian, his dark good looks making him perfectly (mal)adjusted for his trajectory of debauched downward mobility. Predictably, co-star Colin Firth uncannily captures the cynicism and jaded hedonism of Lord Henry, firing out brittle epigrams with a crystalline spikiness as he whisks his pouting protégé through an underworld of gin dens and whorehouses: ‘Most people are mugged by a creeping common sense. They don’t realise until too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes’.
Invariably, Wilde’s original is vulgarised and left gimpishly subjugated to the ever-swelling demands of splashy, big budget CGI – as with Dorian’s putrid, snorting portrait. Whether it was Parker’s cruel intention or not, the film quickly sinks into campy, panto-horror-drenched Gothica, with juxtaposed cuts between twee tea parties and heavy-duty S&M orgies, falling somewhere between Russ Meyer and a Herschell Gordon Lewis B-movie.
Yet, in its quest to prove that life doesn’t imitate art, but is destroyed by it, it is perhaps depressingly logical that Wilde’s vision has been cosily domesticated by tacked-on PC apologia, dumbly explaining away wanton immoralism and decadent excess. With scenes of Dorian’s child abuse and gay sex (rather than seductive homoeroticism), we are given the glib, socially acceptable Oscar that is the cheap product of a very modern makeover.
But safely sordid as Dorian Gray may be, it wouldn’t be surprising if its author is still smirking spitefully from the Great Library in the sky.
