Importance of Being Earnest (Film)

Oliver Parker’s film version of Oscar Wilde’s stage classic The Importance of Being Earnest is a delight. The two male leads are played by Colin Firth and Rupert Everett, who haven’t been on film together since Another Country. Everett camps it up as one would expect (see also his performance in another Wilde film, An Ideal Husband), and Firth modifies his English gentleman act to provide a touch of Victorian fin-de-siecle decadence. Imagine finding Mr. Darcy in a dancehall and you won’t be far off. The comic timing between these two is absolutely superb, giving real verve to Wilde’s lines, which can too often sound like mechanical paradoxes on the page.

The frankly iconic Lady Bracknell is played by the frankly iconic Dame Judi Dench. It’s often cast as a cross-dressed “dame” role, so having an actual Dame play it provides a little novelty. She is absolutely imposing, and obviously thoroughly enjoying herself. Reese Witherspoon and Francis O’Connor supply the parts of Cecily and Gwendolen respectively, making the adolescent fantasist and society girl sufficiently different to be interesting, but sufficiently similar to parallel hilariously in their joint scenes.

Oliver Parker’s screenplay adds several extra sequences to the script, such as flashbacks in which we discover that Lady Bracknell was a showgirl before she married the Colonel, and that Gwendolen’s infatuation with the name “Ernest” extends to having it tattooed on her derriere. He also “realises” some of the fantasy lives implicit in the text; Cecily flits in and out of pre-Raphaelite damsel-in-distress costume, and Algy joins her at one point, looking extremely started to find himself in ornamented “Morte d’Arthurt” armour.

This blurring of reality occurs in more modified form all over the film, as Parker builds a Victorian fantasy world in which Algy arrives at Jack’s estate by dropping out of a hot air balloon, and Jack is chases by creditors all through London to a trad jazz soundtrack, which turns out to be his valet’s band rehearsing in Jack’s flat. Rather than focussing on the critique of social hypocrisy which some critics have found in Wilde’s comedies, Parker has emphasized the way in which the characters construct fantasy worlds for themselves and for each other. He builds elaborate sets, such as Jack’s country estate and Lady Bracknell’s town house, then flattens them, or opens them up, with sudden zooms and improbable angles. The scenery becomes as fluid and colourful as the stories the characters tell each other.

It’s not a film for those who like their Wilde served with realist trappings, or for those who think he needs to be reclaimed from the “frothy comedy” brigade. But it is an entertaining and subtle version of The Importance of Being Earnest, and one which just gets better with repeated viewings.

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