Movie Review: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
Reviewed 8/6/2002

Oscar Wilde was the Monty Python of his day, specializing in fast-paced absurdist English social humor. First performed in 1895 when Wilde was at the height of his popularity, EARNEST is a classic bit of escapist fluff. Sober foundling Jack Worthing (Colin Firth, born to play period romances like PRIDE AND PREJUDICE or VALMONT and modern remakes like BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY), now lord of the manor, invents a dissolute brother Ernest as his excuse to come up to London, where he woos free-spirited self-possessed Gwendolyn Fairfax (Frances O'Connor of MANSFIELD PARK). Meanwhile his friend Algie Moncrieff (Rupert Everett, born to play Wilde, as in AN IDEAL HUSBAND) invents a sickly invalid brother Bunbury, so as to have a ready-made excuse for going to the country and avoiding dinner with imperious Aunt Augusta (Judi Dench, born to play dowagers such as Elizabeth in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE).

For Wilde, plot is simply the absurd Christmas tree on which to hang bon mots and epigrams:

"Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well." "I'm feeling very well, Aunt Augusta." "That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together."
"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square."
"I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane (Edward Fox)." "It never is, sir." "Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist." "I do my best to give satisfaction, sir."
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."
"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

Such lines are meant to produce audience laughter. But great comics need great straight men: Groucho Marx required buxom oblivious Margaret Dumont, who confessed years later that she never understood any of his quips (and in so doing played them better than anyone who got the point could). The society that Wilde infiltrated outwardly valued earnestness and sobriety; his audiences, choked to their high starched collars with sincerity, wanted madcap escapes where wit excused all. So Wilde teased that audience by staging puckish author surrogates (such as Algie, speaking for Wilde), for whom all of life and all of the play is merely a scintillating game, to play in comic tension against fearfully earnest Jack, stolidly missing the point of every joke.

Wilde understood that the twinkling lights of humor must be strung on a twine of story, and he was a romantic, both in life (the idealization of unworthy Bosie) in his fiction … and to that end, he must also tease his audience. "The very essence of romance is uncertainty," says Algie. As passionately as Jack yearns for come-hither Gwendolyn, so must Aunt Augusta guard her like Cerberus -- and neither Jack nor we may know if he will succeed. Yet director Oliver Parker, who showed a sure touch in Wilde's earlier (and much nastier) AN IDEAL HUSBAND, here overplays the hand. When Jack woos Gwendolyn, she simpers in a self-assertive way that might have played in the 1990's, not 1890's. When she and Cecily pretend to pout, Algie (who would) and Jack (who would die first) sing a courtship duet. Even the movie's last image is a directorial meddle: a gesture (not in the play) that Parker added to twist and undermine the meaning of Wilde's final line. This is a double mistake: it makes the movie psychologically anachronistic, and it undermines the dramatic tension of unconsummated love.

But though a directorial mistake, it is survivable: Wilde's wit is so light a bricklayer in concrete galoshes could not drown it. If director Parker is here too eager to sprinkle jimmies on chocolate fudge, clearly he loves his material. So do his actors. So do we. But we do wish, when the lights come up, that Parker had better understood what (for all his flamboyance) Wilde understood: the importance of being earnest.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Reviewed 8/6/2002

ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
Reviewed 8/6/2002