The Importance of Being Earnest
I believe that plays, despite their superficial similarities to film scripts, are even harder to adapt for the cinema than novels. Playwrights fashion their work so that it works within theatrical conventions and limits, whereas a novel is free to range from location to location within an instant and deal closely with intimate incidents — something that film, rather than theatre, can achieve easily. Rarely do plays transcend their theatrical origins when made into films (Amadeus and Throne of Blood come to mind, and both films vastly reimagine their original sources) and, unfortunately, The Importance of Being Earnest is not one of these.
The ultimate flaw with this fairly bland film is that Oscar Wilde’s play, first performed in 1895, just isn’t suited for the screen. No matter how valiantly (or, earnestly) director Oliver Parker tries to open the play up for cinematic treatment (the film opens with a chase scene along a London street, there are a few scenes set in a dance hall, etc, there’s a little bit of tricky editing), the whole film screams of its stage origins.
The plot is profoundly silly (Wilde described it as ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’) and doesn’t bear description (it revolves around mistaken identity, etc, etc). Suffice to say that it mainly exists as a clothes hanger for all sorts of Wildean aphorisms on marriage, family, love, etc. As it stands, the dialogue is still witty and clever, but I’m not sure that it still has the power to provoke laughter amongst a 21st century audience. I chuckled a couple of times, at best.
That’s not to say that there isn’t good stuff in the film. For one thing, it’s very handsomely designed — the costumes and art design are impeccable. The music is good, and, contrary to what I just said, quite well integrated in the film. The performances are solid (as in good, not wooden) — Judi Dench is dependably stern (a la Queen Victoria in Her Majesty, Mrs Brown or Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love) as Lady Bracknell. Reese Witherspoon masters the British accent (in the proud tradition of Gwyneth Paltrow and Renée Zellweger). The two male leads seem to clash. Rupert Everett is suited for this kind of role (he was in Parker’s previous Wilde adaptation, An Ideal Husband) but Colin Firth isn’t a natural comedian — he seems stodgy and stilted most of the time, and towards the end, when he is dancing around in merriment, the sight verges on embarrassing. Tom Wilkinson is wasted in a fairly small role as a bumbling vicar — he probably did this before his Oscar-nominated role in In The Bedroom.
Who then is the film marketed towards? The ‘prestige/costume picture’ crowd will doubtless seek this one out, but it lacks the meat of the average Merchant Ivory production. I saw the film with my grandmother, who enjoyed it, but mainly because she’s seen the 1952 version, as well as a stage performance of the play — she was therefore judging the film in terms of it as an adaptation of the play — which it does admirably. If you are familiar with, and like the play, then by all means go and see the film. I was, however, judging the film on its own terms, as a piece of cinema — and as it stands, it’s a fairly mediocre film. Go and see Gosford Park instead — it’s set similarly in an English country manor only a couple of decades later than The Importance of Being Earnest, and is a much better film. It is, extraordinarily, still playing in the cinema, after almost four months — a feat that I doubt Earnest will be able to repeat.
Brenton Priestley
