Butler's Cinema Scene

Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde

“THE HAPPY PRINCE” My rating: B

105 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Actor Rupert Everettt — who announced that he was gay long before it was fashionable — has for years dreamed of bringing the story of Oscar Wilde to the screen.

The years of preparation have paid off. If Everett’s “The Happy Prince” (he wrote, directed and stars in it) is a sumptuously produced downer that seems to wander, there is no ignoring his performance, which is somehow both deeply personal and monumental.

“…Prince” centers on the last three years of Wilde’s life, spent in exile in Europe after he completed a two-year sentence in British prisons for “gross indecencies with men,”  specifically his affair with young Lord Alfred Douglas.

We meet the great writer in his last impoverished weeks in Paris, cadging cash off anyone who’ll sympathize and blowing it on absinthe, cocaine and young male prostitutes. (His favorites are a pair of brothers whom he compensates with coins and a serialized retelling of his children’s story “The Happy Prince”.)

He’s a pathetic portrait of dissipation — all bloat, lank hair, rouged cheeks and shabby cape — but the famous Wilde wit is ever in evidence. “There is no mystery as great as suffering,” he observes.

The film then flashes back to Wilde’s release from prison three years earlier, his escape across the Channel and his reunion with his beloved “Bosie” (Colin Morgan), a beautiful but spoiled wanker of spectacular selfishness; Lord Alfred sticks around only until his mother threatens to cut off his stipend.

Colin Morgan, Rupert Everett

There are also scenes from the past with Wilde’s long-suffering wife Constance (Emily Watson) and his two young boys, whose absence he hugely regrets.

Helping him out along the way are supporters like actor Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) and especially Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas), Wilde’s first male lover back in the day and soon to be his literary executor.

Not so sympathetic are the young English students (think right-wing frat boys) who chase the writer through the streets of a French coastal town. (“The natural habitat of the hypocrite is England,” Oscar dryly observes.)

Though clearly on his last legs, Wilde finds time both for an all-male orgy in Italy and for religious reflection (he claims to have discovered God in prison, announcing “I am my own Judas”).

Not all of Everett’s writing and directing choices work — there are times when the film’s forward momentum stalls and the fractured narrative seems to push us further away from its subject.

But the picture he presents of a great wit in decline sticks with us. This is a man who fends off ugly reality with a shield of irony, a big figure who alternates between grandiose gestures (drunkenly climbing on a restaurant table to address fellow celebrants) and half-hearted attempts to melt into the background.

Wilde was of course known as the creator of hysterically funny plays and bon mots. But this is the autumnal Wilde; his once-wagging tongue now dispenses wistfulness.

A sad end to splendid life.

| Robert W. Butler