The Importance of Being Earnest
Directed by Oliver Parker
Review by Rada Djurica
We all know who Oscar Wilde was. Today, Wilde is an icon for every living homosexual in the world. But let's forget his sexual identity, for a moment.
We all know that he has written "a few" amazing plays: sweet, and even cheesy, in his time and yet classic today.
The Importance of Being Earnest is classic Oscar Wilde, starring Rupert Everett as Earnest. The cast couldn’t be better chosen. The Importance of Being Earnest is a play, and film, about four young people becoming two happy couples, with a splash of mistaken identity along the way. It can also be seen as "an expression" of gay identity experienced in Victorian England and Victorian language.
And then we have Judy Dench, the mind-everyone’s-business Victorian mother.
Oscar Wilde once said, "Treat all the trivial things in life seriously, and all the serious things in life with sincere and studied triviality."
While poor readers in Victorian England would not have appreciated that sentiment, I'm sure it was the greatest wisdom to the Victorian aristocracy.
Technically, the film Importance of being Earnest is a perfectly neat piece of work: very theatrical, very BBC-like. It's not easy to be so classic, but not as dreadfully boring as British television.
Algernon and Jack are two young men living in London. Algernon has a made up friend called Bunbury, who is conveniently ill and in need of assistance any time events come up he doesn't wish to attend.
Jack lives in the country, but has an invented younger brother, which gives him the excuse to visit London, where he can meet up with Gwendolyn, daughter of Lady Bracknell, Algernon's aunt.
Algernon discovers Jack's real name is Jack and not "Earnest" as he'd claimed and that Jack has no clue about who really lives in his country house. Algernon, pretends to be Earnest, because he discovers the ladies have infatuations for men called Earnest.
A group of young people find themselves alone in the cottage house on the countryside. Gwendolyn also arrives, looking for "Earnest" (Jack), and a cat-mouse game starts. Until Lady Bracknell (Judy Dench) arrives to retrieve her errant daughter. Everything slowly starts to become clear. People get conveniently coupled with each other. The ladies' passion for men named Earnest is miraculously fulfilled, and the fairytale ends.
And who could be better as prim and proper Lady Bracknell than Judy Dench?
This being a play by Oscar Wilde, there is some subtext. Both men live double lives, with two identities, both depending on the existence of a fictional other man. The name "Bunbury" is cheesy, evocative and suggestive. Furthermore, Mr. Bunbury is always ill. During the Victorian era, homosexuality was often associated with illness and deviance.
The play is over-the-top, an idyllic rich life lived by high class people. A familiar theme in Victorian theatre, if make-believe. Wilde comments brutally on the vanities of his age.
I'm always looking for context after seeing such movies, assuming that much of the humor is topical and therefore is lost, since society has changed.
While today's rules and conventions are just as ridiculous, the fact that we are living in the 21st century makes everything different. In today's world of television, spaceships and raw sex scenes, such a world might appear interesting only to students and film critics.
Language and drama students would enjoy the incredible neatness of the film, because it is well worth seeing as reading the Victorian play, to get a picture of the world the way Wilde viewed it.