Film Circle
Saturday, March 13th, 7:00 pm

Wilde

Gay comic actor and novelist Stephen Fry makes for a uncannily realistic Oscar Wilde in this involving drama on the Irish-born poet and playwright’s life. Basically a chronological recounting of Wilde’s rise and fall (as told through a 1990s perspective), the drama’s strengths lie less with the (for many familiar) plot but rather with its characterizations. With sad but mischievous eyes, saddled with an almost lumbering body but armed with a rapier wit, Fry’s Wilde makes for both a fascinating and sympathetic character: a man ruined emotionally and professionally by his sexual weakness and pride. Jude Law is alternately beautiful, slimy, charming and scheming as Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas), the aristocrat’s son whose hatred for his stern father fuels vows of vengeance, feelings that inadvertently seal the lovelorn Wilde’s sad fate.

This version of Wilde shows a man torn between his craving of respectability and family life with his long-suffering wife and children while always being drawn to the seedy gay underworld of London’s rent boys, homosexual brothels and society gay boys. And ultimately it offers the gay world of today a look at a tragic gay martyr.

-- Review provided by TLA Video ( http://www.tlavideo.com )