ScreenWize

The history of cinema is littered with the wreckage of classic literature that has crashed and burned on the big screen, and Dorian Gray will head straight to the top of this sad list. It’s a profoundly flawed film made barely watchable by the performance of Colin Firth – the only character on either side of the camera who manages a modicum of subtlety. The rest is an overblown pastiche of Victorian bodice-ripping, pseudo gothic horror and drearily repetitive drawing-room moralising.

Based on the slim Oscar Wilde classic The Picture of Dorian Gray, the film follows the journey of a beautiful and naive young man Dorian (Ben Barnes) who is tempted to test out the hedonistic side of life by cynical married friend Harry Wotton (Colin Firth). Initially oblivious to Harry’s insight that the good and civilized of the world are no more than cowards who die of commonsense one lost moment after another, Dorian yields to temptation when he realizes that it is his new portrait that collects the suffering and effects that sin and debauchery would otherwise heap on his soul and body. He plunges headlong into the sordid underworld of London’s whorehouses and opium dens and, whilst friends and lovers around him age and weather, he remains shiny and youthful – his only concern keeping others away from seeing what is happening to the painting.

First time screenwriter Toby Finlay mangles Wilde’s idea completely, placing it neither as simple horror nor as a complex Faustian tale of a tortured soul – ultimately over-explaining everything and failing to translate an essentially psychological drama into a unified screen story with its own vibrancy. The romances added at either end of the film are dull and clichéd, and a series of unexplained flashbacks to some tortured childhood of Dorian’s lead nowhere. Finlay also chooses to gloss over the complex relationship that Wilde develops between Gray and his painted image. With such a woeful script, director Oliver Parker – who made much more successful film versions of Othello, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, struggles to get anything beyond melodrama with all but the experienced Firth, and the film’s editing, computer-generated imagery and overblown score are obtrusively poor.

If it was Oscar Wilde who said that experience is the name that everyone gives to their mistakes, then this Dorian Gray is quite an experience.

Rating:

Filed Under: Reviews by Simon