I can admit that I came to watch the Oliver Parker screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest in a state of extreme prejudice. I tried to approach the movie with an open mind, but failed miserably.
The reason is clear. The play had been filmed once before, in Britain in 1952, and that version, directed by Anthony Asquith, is rightly judged as the definitive performance of Earnest, anywhere, any time, in any medium. When there exists such a masterpiece, why bother?
This is, of course, dangerous reasoning. Many people had judged Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Nabakov's Lolita a minor masterpiece. The upstart ad-agency renegade Adrian Lyne then made his own screen adaptation - and his, against all expectations, was far truer to Nabakov's despairing novel - it was a greater film. So although prejudiced, I was prepared to be, even hoping to be, surprised.
Well, the film is in some ways better than I had expected. But in most key areas it does fall way short of the 1952 masterpiece.
The strengths are in some aspects of the direction. The earlier film was largely stage-bound. There was very little adaptation from stage to screen, apart from excising some dialogue. The structure remained that of the play, moving from scene to scene, act to act. Oliver Parker adapts ferociously, turning the stage-play into a genuine movie with acute filmic fluidity and scene inter-cutting. The references to Burne Jones's art, the pre-Raphaelite sexy dreams... these fit into the world of the play with ease.
The locations are wondrous. High Victorian mansions, rolling countryside vistas, the stuff very upper-class dreams are made of.
But from here the whole enterprise starts to come unstuck. The cast and director are not, frankly, strong enough for the demands of Wilde's wittiest comedy. The central character of Jack, played in the 1952 classic by Michael Redgrave with constantly affronted aplomb, is taken by Colin Firth - who was the perfect Darcy in both Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones - in a hesitant way which lacks all the hypocritical self-righteousness and authority of the original.
Rupert Everett as Algy displays quite a lot of the authority which should be Jack's. He plays the bounder exceedingly well - but is just a bit too louche and too tired for the role. I found Frances O'Connor's portrayal of Gwendolyn one of the strengths of the film. She lacks the smouldering subterranean eroticism of Joan Greenwood in the 1952 version, but has her own completely convincing wicked flirtatiousness.
Frances is, in fact, the strongest cast member. Moving to her screen mum, we find that Judy Dench as Lady Bracknell just isn't a patch on Edith Evans's avaricious curmudgeon. Dench, usually an uncommonly fine actor, shares with the rest of the cast an apparent unwillingness to give full measure to Wilde's greatest comic lines - they get thrown away, as if there's fear that they'll interfere with the flow of the story. And that is, of course, exactly what Wilde hoped his great aphorisms would do, and something which Asquith allowed them to do in his movie adaptation.
The biggest casting misfortune is Reese Witherspoon as Cecily. The character is supposed to have steely strength, but this is meant to be masked behind an air of naive callow sweetness. There's no naive sweetness in Reece - this is no sheltered country girl waiting to be courted, this is a modern girl who strikes a jarring anachronistic note.
The same anachronism mars the movie throughout through its music. Parker uses 1920s jazz themes and even proto-rock as the aural background - when that background moves into the foreground as if turning the movie into a musical, what credibility the movie did have gets shredded severely.
This could have been a reasonably good movie, with a little more authority from the cast and with music which was not so relentlessly set against the tone and the time of the play. There are things here to admire, but too few to add up to a worthwhile whole. The overall result? If you see it for sale, ask instead for the 1952 version - to do otherwise is verging on criminal negligence.
