Despite it's great literary pedigree - a staple of sexually repressed intellectuals and first year literature students for decades - there have been surprisingly few attempts to bring Oscar Wilde's cautionary tale of preternatural self-destruction to the screen. And on this evidence it's easy to see why. A surprisingly confusing interpretation of what is in essence a very simple idea - unbridled excess is it's own punishment - British helmer Oliver Parker's stuffy period puff muddles the source's central dilemma by being too literal. Laying bare everything that is alluded to in the book, Dorian Gray leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination, reducing the sins of all man to the level of an arthouse softcore porn flick.
Arriving in London to inherit the estate of his estranged late father, sheltered young fop Dorian Gray (Ben Barnes) falls in with high-society fellow Harry (Colin Firth), a misanthropic, unapologetic hedonist who insists that youth is wasted on the young. Entranced by a striking portrait of himself done by his artist friend Basil (Ben Chaplin), Gray whimsically barters away his soul in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. The portrait instead baring the marks Gray's actions inflict upon himself.
Crucial to Wilde's text was the subtlety with which Gray's hedonistic escapades were hinted at but never explicitly stated, with each reader then able to project their own darkest desires into the frame. Radiant as the production design might be, and it really is exquisite, Grey's antics, once revealed, come across as little more than vulgar. He drinks a lot, he smokes a lot, he shags a lot, and he is rude to a great many people at parties. Ho-hum. Parker tries to make a show of it - all dutch angles, soft lighting and low moaning ecstasy - but at the end of the day it's still just two people (or in some cases three or four) having sex.
In fact, so preoccupied is Parker with the pleasures of the flesh that he almost forgets to flesh out the man partaking of them. Ben Barnes is every bit the requisite dish - porcelain good looks, silky flowing mane - but is never given the opportunity to dig at the loss of identity and the chasm of lonely despair lurking behind the eyes. A cipher in his own story, Barnes' Gray meanders passively through a series of random encounters whereby stuff just seems to happen, driven out of sheer necessity to plot mechanics as opposed to anything actually organic to the tale.
Equally misjudged is the tone, with Parker seemingly unable to synthesize a happy medium, and instead veering back-and-forth from high-society drama, to supernatural thriller almost arbitrarily. Thanks goodness for Colin Firth, an actor who has really come into his own, who lifts the entire picture each and every second he is on screen, and who, not for the first time in recent years, gives the performance of a man who has been kidnapped and taken to the wrong set. To be fair to Parker, the scenes featuring Gray's dreaded portrait, locked away behind iron bars in the attic, calling out to him in the dark, are genuinely chilling. But they are never the window to the soul that this particular story requires that they be.
DVD Bonus Features
Extras include an audio commentary with director Oliver Parker, and screenwriter Toby Finlay. also included are multiple behind-the-scenes featurettes, a making-of with cast and crew interviews, as well as a blooper reel and select deleted scenes.
"Dorian Gray" is on sale September 7, 2010 and is rated R. Drama, Horror. Directed by Oliver Parker. Written by Toby Finlay (Screenplay), Oscar Wilde (Novel). Starring Ben Barnes, Ben Chaplin, Colin Firth, Rachel Hurd Wood, Rebecca Hall.
