REVIEW
The Happy Prince
Stars: 5.0
Starring Rupert Everett , Colin Firth, Colin Morgan, Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson, Anna Chancellor, Edwin Thomas, Béatrice Dalle, Julian Wadham, John Standing, André Penvern, Tom Colley, Stephen M. Gilbert, Alister Cameron, Benjamin Voisin
Written and directed by Rupert Everett
Rated: 14A for violence, coarse language, smoking and drug use, nudity and sexual content
Runtime: 105 minutes
Now playing at the Princess Theatre, 10337 82 Ave. (Whyte Ave.) in Edmonton. Visit www.princesstheatre.ca for more information.
A labour of love, this, and ultimately as timely and relevant to the modern age as to the period that it depicts. I tip my hat to Rupert Everett for this triumph of storytelling, which seems to have come at great personal cost, much like what occurred to Oscar Wilde himself.
Wilde became one of the world’s great playwrights and authors back in the late 1800s. His wit surpassed only his intelligence to tell stories for the audience and for the reader. Maybe it was the other way around. Nevertheless, I fell in love with his words immediately while reading The Importance of Being Earnest. If you don’t have a Bunbury in your life then certainly you are more beholden to social obligations than perhaps you should be.
The Irish-born writer was celebrated throughout London for his literary and dramatic successes, but it was his personal life that provided the reason for the abrupt turn of all of his plaudits into scorns.
He was homosexual. For that, he was not only outcast socially, but sent to prison for his “crime”. Wilde’s two-year sentence might just as well have been a death sentence since he never recovered from it. His health declined right along with his social status and he died, penniless, in a poorly appointed Paris hotel room, at the young age of 46.
If this doesn’t sound like the distant cousin of what just happened to Allyson MacIvor at Rogers Place this week then think harder. The seriousness of the outcome might be different but the precipitation is exactly the same.
While we still celebrate his stories like The Picture of Dorian Gray, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, we’ve never seen a screen version of Wilde’s life story until now. And it’s utterly brilliant and heartbreaking, thanks to Everett’s decade-long dedication to getting it made. He obviously cared deeply about the subject matter, since he’s never written and directed a movie before.
“Oscar Wilde seemed to be the ideal character. Not the Wilde of folklore, the iconic family man, the life and soul of the café royal but a different Wilde, the real one, actually punished and crushed by society. I would write the Passion of Wilde,” Everett wrote in a director’s statement about the project that was made available through a media kit, wherein he described his lifelong fascination and appreciation of the real life figure.
The Happy Prince uses the writer’s own eponymously-titled children’s story as the framework for a recounting of his life. Wilde (played also by Everett) reads the story to his children while the movie jumps from the end of his life to all of the events that led him there. There’s pathos aplenty, and this is the part that Everett was born to play. If he doesn’t get any kind of laudation for it, well that would be another tragedy.
Thankfully, there are many light moments during the rise of his star. Wilde himself had incalculable talents with ideas and words, and his bon mots and epigrams are just as famous as his published plays and other writings. It is a pure joy to see Everett-as-Wilde re-enact those witty rejoinders and other sparkling bits of intellectual wordplay. And just like many great works of fiction, it doesn’t have a happy ending, yet it is worth watching over and over for its heartbreaking accuracy and resonance.
