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The Happy Prince
****
Dir: Rupert Everett
Starring: Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Emily Watson
(UK, 15, 1hr 45 mins)
The last days of Oscar Wilde are brought to the screen by Rupert Everett, who has embodied the playwright before on stage in David Hare’s play The Judas Kiss, as well as having taken part in onscreen adaptations of Wilde’s work, most notably in Oliver Parker’s versions of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest.
He obviously feels a kinship with the noble and ultimate tragic wit that was Wilde and relishes recounting a semi-imagined final few years for him. Following his infamous libel trial against the Marquess of Queensberry (with whose son Bosie Wilde had had a torrid affair), Wilde was imprisoned in Reading Gaol, and after his release into an exiled life in Paris, Wilde was a broken man.
Nevertheless, this film follows Wilde as he re-embarks on his love affair with the aristocratic Bosie, played with glee by Colin Morgan, despite their lives now being one of squalor and illness rather than effete frippery and critical plaudits. Friends Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas) and Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) attempt to come to Wilde’s aid but they are rebuffed, with Wilde enduring homophobic encounters and hypocrisy all around him.
Class had made Wilde a victim, and ultimately his hubris and his tragic love for Bosie brought him down. His wife Constance, played with quiet fire by Emily Watson, cuts him off from any money, leaving him in the gutter looking up at the stars. He recounts his fairytale The Happy Prince to the rent boys he encounters, his ego dented.
In Everett’s hands, not just as a lead but also as writer/director, Wilde discovers redemption, raging at his fall from grace, but also damaged and perhaps less arrogant than he had been. Wilde had thought he could take on the establishment and win. He could not. In The Happy Prince, Wilde’s final years become an edifying portrait of an unjust society and a man coming to terms with who and what he is.
words Keiron Self