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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Send This Review to a Friend
In an apparent effort to do something different in bringing his version of Oscar Wilde's play to the screen, director Oliver Parker has mucked it up to the point where it is merely passable entertainment. The overall feeling of the film is modern instead of period, at least the late 19th century period. The music is more 1920s, the cinematic style more 2002, and in addition, Parker resorts to such extraneous fluff as fleetingly enveloping one of the male leads in armor to suggest how an amorous young woman perceives him.
Such frills only serve to take away from Wilde's wit, which is really what drives the piece as Wilde twits the mores and social strata of the time with a plot that involves pretense and mistaken identity in working out the love relationships. Colin Firth plays Jack Worthing, who has created a fictional brother named Ernest. The other male lead is Rupert Everett as Algy Moncreef, a bon vivant whose overspending leaves a trail of bill collectors. Jack has a pretty niece, his ward Cecily Cardew (Reese Witherspoon), whom Algy adores. Meanwhile, Jack is enamoured of Gwendolen Fairfax (Frances O'Connor), whose mother Lady Bracknell (Dame Judi Dench) is determined to only bestow upon someone of status and money. Add the complication that both eligible women are earnest about wanting to love someone named Ernest.
It takes but a moment of Dench delivering a knowing line from Wilde to see what's wrong with this picture. She delightfully denotes the required style, as was evident in Anthony Asquith's 1952 version that starred Dame Edith Evans, Michael Redgrave, Dorothy Tutin, Joan Greenwood and Margaret Rutherford. Witherspoon and O'Connor, charming as they are, have more of a contemporary flavor, although Firth and Everett meet the period requirements more easily.
Parker's screenplay contains enough of Wilde's witticisms, but as a director he has let himself run wild with trying to give the film a now ambience, or as he has said "a more modern cinematic approach." He fared much better with his adaptation of Wilde's "An Ideal Husband." Here the importance of being earnestly faithful has been overlooked. A Miramax Films release.
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