Rupert Everett (2018)

This is the first time that Rupert Everett has written and directed for the screen but not the first time he’s been Oscar Wilde:  he played him on stage in the 2012 revival of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss.  Both these things have their effect on The Happy Prince.   As if to show he’s familiar with moviemaking technique, Everett splinters the narrative, with frequent flashes back and forward, and favours a handheld camera.  Knowing Wilde’s life story as well as he doubtless does, he seems to assume everyone else will be clued up too.  There have been Wilde biopics before, of course, but I’d not seen Oscar Wilde (1960), The Green Carnation[1] (1960) or Wilde (1997), or read more than a few articles about his trial, his imprisonment or his last days as Sebastian Melmoth.  Everett’s fragmented storytelling did little to improve my hazy knowledge of ‘Bosie’ and after.  The hyperactive camerawork limits the viewer’s opportunities to register the physical settings with the result that the contrasts between the high life enjoyed by Wilde in his celebrity heyday and his severely reduced circumstances after his release from prison, don’t come across clearly.  In spite of its visually frenetic surface, The Happy Prince is, as might be expected given its subject, a largely verbal piece.  Everett doesn’t overdo his delivery of the epigrams and he’s good in Wilde’s more exhausted moments.  Yet his playing brings to mind a screen recreation of a celebrated stage portrayal that the actor concerned looks to have worked out during the theatre run.  (Recycling is probably a better word than recreation.)  That’s not quite what’s happening here:  in spite of their common ground, The Happy Prince isn’t an adaptation of The Judas Kiss.  Even so, Rupert Everett, as well as being very conscious of giving the-performance-of-his-life, seems to know Oscar Wilde rather too well.

The film isn’t a simple hagiography:  there are occasional illustrations of the exploitative, even predatory, side of the hero’s nature.  But Oscar Wilde, today, is one of the most famous victims of injustice of all time and The Happy Prince majors on his victimhood.  (No less unsurprisingly, this is eventually made representative:  the closing legends note that Wilde was one of many thousands of men posthumously pardoned in 2017 for offences for which they were convicted when homosexuality was illegal in Britain.)  This focus is at the expense of probing, for example, what possessed Wilde, in the last part of his life, to renew contact with his nemesis, Lord Alfred Douglas.  At one point, his loyal friend Robbie Ross calls Oscar a masochist but in a tone of no more than mildly exasperated affection, and the theme isn’t pursued further.  Just as Wilde is a victim, so Robbie (Edwin Thomas) is a decent chap and Bosie (Colin Morgan) an effetely nasty piece of work.   That’s just about all the actors playing them put across, with the result that neither engages interest.  (The closing legends about Robbie and Bosie seem designed to echo The Importance of Being Earnest’s line ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily’, ignoring that ‘That is what Fiction means’.)  Colin Firth plays Reggie Turner, another member of Wilde’s circle who stood by him.  Firth’s trademark buttoned-up quality is interesting in this context but the role is so underwritten that it doesn’t count for much.

The Happy Prince is decidedly anti-English and there’s never a suggestion that the components of contemporary homophobia might have included ignorance and (as the word suggests) fear.  It’s unadulterated hatred.  Wilde recalls with horror sitting handcuffed to a prison officer at Clapham Junction station, en route from Wandsworth Prison to Reading Gaol, and being spat at by people on the railway platform.  (Minor point:  this may be a coincidence but details in another train station sequence, when Wilde says goodbye to Robbie (or Bosie?), struck me as a pinch from Cabaret.  Wilde’s mention of not being cut out to wave a white handkerchief echoes Sally Bowles’s line; Rupert Everett’s farewell gesture – waggling the fingers of one upright hand, as he turns and walks away from the camera – replicates Liza Minnelli’s.)  The Clapham expectorators are working-class; better-heeled commuters look on smirkingly.  To even things out, Everett has a group of cricket-playing English public schoolboys cross the Channel in order to bait and chase Wilde in exile.

In contrast, sexual tolerance flourishes at various levels of Parisian society, except when Everett needs to provoke a fight in a café, where the legionnaire Maurice (Tom Colley) defends his lover Wilde’s honour.  More striking is a sequence in Naples, where Wilde was holed up for a few months (this is also the setting for The Judas Kiss‘s second act).   Oscar presides over a gathering of more or less naked young men, including Felice (Antonio Spagnuolo), whose mother (Franca Abategiovanni) angrily interrupts proceedings.  (Felice is good-looking and his mother presented as grotesque yet there is, amusingly, a credible family resemblance.)  The mother is furious because she thinks the men have (female) ‘whores’ hidden away.  When Wilde assures her this is a ‘gentlemen’s party’, she laughs and sighs with apologetic relief.  She does so presumably not because she’s sexually enlightened but because the idea of male homosexuality is virtually inconceivable to a working woman in 1890s Naples[2].  The effect of the scene is nevertheless to suggest how essentially agreeable Italians are – in the standard comical-melodramatic way – compared with the harshly humourless English.

Emily Watson gives a creditable performance as Wilde’s wife, even if Constance seems more (and understandably) horrified by her husband’s self-admiring speech to a first-night audience, following the triumphant reception of his latest play, than she does by his subsequent notoriety.  I may be misremembering but I don’t think Watson and Rupert Everett have a single scene together, other than when Constance appears as a premonitory vision to Wilde, on the night before news of her death reaches him by telegram.  His young sons appear mainly to complement two other kids to whom Wilde also, and gradually, tells his story of The Happy Prince.   The other pair are Paris street urchins, the elder of whom, Jean (Benjamin Voisin), Wilde uses as a rent boy.  The irony of the youngsters’ different circumstances is effective, even if some of the scenes involving them are sentimental, and Benjamin Voisin is very good as Jean.  It’s Tom Wilkinson who steals the show, though, as the professionally brisk and rather witty Irish priest (in Paris) who receives Wilde, on his deathbed, into the Catholic Church.

3 July 2018

[1]  Also known as The Trials of Oscar Wilde.

[2] The fact that homosexuality became legal throughout Italy in 1890 hardly makes a difference.  Rupert Everett presumably wouldn’t think that the population of Britain was enlightened en masse by the legislation of 1967.