So the other day my friend linked me to the trailer for the new Picture of Dorian Gray movie.
It looks good, but I had difficulty telling her how and why it looked very different from the book. I’ve finally put my finger on what it was (and I’m a little embarrassed at how long that took): it seems like they’ve taken out all the Oscar Wilde-ishness. In all fairness the full trailer’s not out yet, so it’s really too early to tell whether or not the movie retains any of Wilde’s dancing razor wit. But the impression I had was more of a dark, supernatural sex-capade rather than gothic horror/satire about decadence. It almost looked like a vampire movie with Monsieur Gray instead of the vampires. Which wouldn’t be a surprise, every studio is trying to cash in on the vamp-revival created by Twilight (ugh) lately, and Dorian Gray holds all the best tenets of vamp-hood without the fangs: beauty, ever-lasting youth, seduction and all those questions raised by the absence of a soul (well, sort of anyway).
More surprising than any of the above things though for me, is the casting of Colin Firth as Lord Henry Wotton. Really? I mean don’t get me wrong, I have much love for Colin Firth, going way back to his wet-shirted Mr Darcy days. He was also good in The Importance of Being Earnest a few years back, so he’s done a Wilde piece before, and he was pretty smouldering in Girl With a Pearl Earring. He’s good in most things really. But I just can’t see him as Wotton. I suspect that even acting his hardest there’s fundamentally doesn’t have that Wotton-ish quality. I’m hoping he’ll prove me wrong, but more likely he’ll be his own version of Wotton (which won’t be quite the same Wotton from the novel, quite possibly just like the rest of the movie). Maybe I’m being too harsh though, since he’s never disappointed so far. And nobody say Stephen Fry, because I adore him, but I think he’d over-play it a little bit.
Personally I always pictured Wotton as being based on Oscar Wilde himself, but according to according to trusty Wikipedia (see, I do research!), in Wilde’s own words it goes like this “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps”. Interesting, huh?
One thing that they got spot on however was the casting of the damn fine Ben Barnes as Dorian Gray. I think he’s going to be the sexiest libertine since, well, since before Pete Doherty got super fucked up (I mean back when he was only mildly fucked up, and appeared to still be occasionally bathing and brushing his teeth) and him and Carl Barat (oh Carl, I still love you) were still doing that pass-the-mic-with-sexual-tension thing they did so well, spurring on the slashy fantasies of thousands of fan girls in the process (*sigh*). Ben Barnes, a.k.a. that boy who plays a badly-accented but otherwise passable Prince Caspian in the Narnia movies, well, I gotta say I like him. He’s tall, dark and delicious, with unusually dark eyes (almost black), which is definitely a plus when you’re playing it dangerous ;]. Yum.
So moving on from dreamy boys and such… um… where was I? Oh yes, right. Well, even if the film turns out to have just taken the bare bones of the story and built a whole different body with them (you see what I did there? Ahahaha. Why I laugh? That was pretty sad… Ohwellnevermind) into something else, I’ll probably still go see this. It looks entertaining, and it contains said dreamy boy Ben Barnes. ‘Nuff said.
^_^
Tags: ben barnes, book to film adaptation, carl barat, colin firth, dorian gray, libertines, oscar wilde, pete doherty, vampire, wilde
