不可儿嬉 The Importance of Being Earnest review by Stephanie Zacharek

No adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play should go wrong when it stars Rupert Everett: He simply gets Wilde in his bones, without being hamstrung by an urge to somehow freshen the material or make it feel more "modern." He was bliss to watch in the 1999 "An Ideal Husband" -- his lines always hit on just the right beat, but more important, he also knew that Wilde should be played mostly with the eyebrows. What Everett doesn't say, and how he doesn't say it, represents the purest interpretation of Wilde possible.

So it's hard to understand how "The Importance of Being Earnest," which also stars Everett and was adapted and directed by Oliver Parker, the same man who made "An Ideal Husband," goes so wrong. "The Importance of Being Earnest" is a much more preposterous play, designed to feel more outlandish and unreal with each plot twist: It's the story of a resolute, carefree bachelor-scoundrel named Algernon (Everett) and his pal, the more buttoned-down Jack (Colin Firth), who have both fallen in love with women who are mad about the name Earnest.

Algy's inamorata is Jack's excessively romantic and silly young ward, Cecily (Reese Witherspoon); Jack is eager to win the affections of Gwendolen (Frances O'Connor), a ridiculous society girl who can't raise her parasol without attracting the scrutiny of her overprotective, glowering mother, Lady Bracknell (Judi Dench).

There's also a local clergyman (Tom Wilkinson) who's secretly in love with Cecily's spinster governess Miss Prism (Anna Massey), as well as a missing baby in a handbag, which gives you some idea of the effect Wilde was after. The problem with Parker's "Earnest" is that each successive absurdity is telegraphed more and more loudly, lest the audience somehow miss the joke. At times the movie is gentle to the point of inertia; worse, though, is the way Parker punctuates what should be the story's funniest, most over-the-top bits with jazzy horn riffs or drippy, whimsical music, instead of letting them ride the wave of their own understatement.

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