Wilde was the dandy as superstar; in the years before mass media, he wrote best sellers and long-running plays, and went on enormously popular lecture tours. (The film opens with him down in a silver mine in Nevada, reading poetry to the miners and beaming upon their muscular torsos.) He invented the type exploited later by Elvis Presley: the peacock in full plumage, kidding himself.
Born in Dublin, he came out of Ireland more or less expecting to behave as a heterosexual, and was sincere in his marriage to Constance (Jennifer Ehle). He loved his children, and the movie uses one of his children's stories as a counterpoint. But when a young Canadian house guest named Robbie (Michael Sheen) boldly approached him in the parlor late one night, Wilde responded. He might have settled into an existence of discreet bisexuality had it not been for his meeting, some years later, the beautiful young Lord Alfred Douglas (Jude Law), known as "Bosie," who was, if Wilde had only realized it, more interested in his fame than his body.
Bosie liked to flirt and flaunt. There is a scene in a restaurant where the two men smoke, smile and hold hands, while all of London seems to look on. Bosie did that to shock. Wilde did it because he was a genuinely sweet man who believed in expressing his feelings, and was naive about how much leeway he'd be given because of his fame. Bosie's physical interest in Wilde soon waned, and he took the playwright to a famous male brothel, which Wilde seems to have seen as an opportunity to expose handsome, working-class lads to the possibilities of higher culture.
It is so sad, how ripe Wilde was for destruction. We can see the beginning of the end in an extraordinary scene in a restaurant, where Wilde calmly charms the tough, angry Marquess of Queensbury (Tom Wilkinson). The Marquess is happy to exchange tips about fly-fishing, but warns Wilde to stay away from his son (ironic, since Wilde was the seduced, not the seducer). Soon it all comes down to a humiliating courtroom scene, despite the desperate advice of loyal Robbie to stay far away from the law. Those who know of Wilde at third hand may be under the impression that the marquess hauled him into court; actually, it was Wilde who sued the marquess for slander.
Stephen Fry brings a depth and gentleness to the role that says what can be said about Oscar Wilde: that he was a funny and gifted idealist in a society that valued hypocrisy above honesty. Because he could make people laugh, he thought they always would. Bosie lived on for years, boring generations of undergraduates with his fatuous egotism. He grew gross and ugly. Wilde once said that he could forgive a man for what he was, but not for what he became.
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