不可儿嬉 The Importance of Being Earnest review by David Noh

Director Oliver Parker has not so much adapted Oscar Wilde's comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest as he has exploded it. As if fearing to make this farce about the dandies Algernon Moncrief (Rupert Everett) and Jack Worthing (Colin Firth), and their arduous wooing of, respectively, Cecily Cardew (Reese Witherspoon) and Gwendolyn Fairfax (Frances O'Connor), yet one more drawing-room comedy, he slices and dices the play to bits, setting it in Edwardian theatres, restaurants, sylvan countryside settings, ridiculous Burne-Jones-style Pre-Raphaelite fantasy tableaux, even a tattoo parlor (!). Parker seems enamored of the idea of Algernon's constantly being pursued by creditors as a way of lending non-essential "action" to his film. A certain staginess is avoided, but, unfortunately, much of the exquisite rhythm of Wilde's matchless dialogue is also ineffably lost. Parker possesses nothing if not hubris in the way he has rearranged the piece and, in many cases, excised choice Wildean lines. (Gwendolyn's absurdly haughty proclamation, "I rejoice to say that I have never seen a spade," is particularly missed.) What we're left with is a series of pretty pictures and a few performance flourishes, but ultimately so much less than what was afforded by Anthony Asquith's definitive, if almost suffocatingly stagy, 1952 version. A lush, often inappropriate, modern music score makes cinematically moist what was once so theatrically dry (and therefore, effective).

Algernon is the role that Everett was obviously born to play, but, unfortunately, he's waited too long to do it. By now, his every performance is the same--preeningly narcissistic, camera-hoggish and singularly lacking in true charm or, most essentially, heart. (He's a marvelous clotheshorse, however, in Maurizio Millenotti's elegant, "tennis-anyone?" bespoke.) Firth also delivers his usual humorless, harrumphing bit. One has only to go back to the literate Another Country, in which these actors performed together in 1984, to see how much promise has now evaporated into a reliable, if unexciting, sameness. Witherspoon has mastered a Brit accent almost as effectively as Gwyneth Paltrow, and does better than the "boys," making Cecily both pert and pleasing. (It's not her fault that she and Everett have a May September non-chemistry to their courtship.) O'Connor gives the freshest performance, imbuing Gwendolyn with a funny and startlingly direct sensuality which, however anachronistic, is an interesting contrast to the indelible Joan Greenwood's purring perversity in the Asquith. We're afraid Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell falls into the category of big missed film chances. Presumptuous as ever, Parker's camera can't keep still during her character's famous comedic arias. The incessant cuts to reactive close-ups after each bon mot is delivered are a hellish intrusion upon this superb actress, who has no chance of making us forget Edith Evans (who made this ultimate dragon lady her special triumph). Anna Massey provides some ornithological humor as the hapless nurse, Prism. Tom Wilkinson is merely tiresome as her shy suitor, Dr. Chasuble.

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