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The Happy Prince may be the best work of art made about the life of Oscar Wilde. What makes it especially compelling is how it concentrates on his last years, after his release from Reading Gaol, though it glimpses, importantly, earlier times as well.
It is not, in the usual sense, a biopic. Nor does it suffer from the frequent faults of biopics whether of sentimentality, hagiography, the airing of grievances, tabloid-like flourishes, intentionally demeaning exposures of the person’s real life and character, and so on. It never lapses into those caricatures of a character that so many Wilde films have dipped into, as if the man were little more than a self-destructive buffoon. What makes The Happy Prince so distinctive, so finely wrought, among other reasons, is its seriousness.
Beautifully written and directed by Everett, sensitively, complexly acted by him and everyone else in the cast as well, it is a movie about a man in a spiritual crisis that is never resolved. It is about the profound pathos of a man’s living in a world after having been brought down to an almost absolute experience of shame, an emptying out of all he thought he was and meant. It is about, in short, Wilde’s long dark night of the soul.
His suffering is never trivialized or made the stuff of mere humor or the exercise of wit. Neither is his past undermined, though it is, by himself and by others, questioned. For Everett’s movie in no way judges Wilde. It does not put him on another sort of trial. The Happy Prince is a movie whose vision is ethical in the ways in which the struggle for some sort of redemption must be ethical, even if the effort never reaches its goal. But it is not judgmental; it never lapses, or lets it characters lapse, into easy platitudes, pat resolutions, clichés of sentiment, or cheap moralism.
It lets Wilde be Wilde throughout, a man of almost formidable ambiguity and paradox, though in his last years not in the manner of his previous portrayal of himself through wit, irony, and performance, but in his ever-present longing for the release from suffering without the loss of self, without denying who he is and, in a sense, must be.
Like Wilde himself, nearly every major character in the film, even those who at times act most questionably, even destructively, is treated generously––by which I mean they are given the significance every human being who is struggling with his seemingly determined place in the world deserves. In this film, even Bosie is allowed some almost charitable moments while remaining demonic, narcissistic, and often cruel. The recurrent presence of Robbie Ross in the movie offers a measure for everyone else, a man who appears nearly innately kind. Even the priest who is summoned to attend Wilde on his death bed is richly observed and given weight and seriousness. In fact, what frequently is astonishing about the people in this mostly dark world is how kind the best of them can sometimes be, especially in the midst of the cruelty, the viciousness, the common indecency of others.
The two boys to whom Wilde tells the story of The Happy Prince, much as he had told it to his two sons years before, are perhaps the most remarkably imagined, two lads who live at the furthest edge of the world, at the border of desperation, who are allowed their full humanity, as is Wilde himself, of course, reciting the story, his seductive, tragic fairy tale, recurrently throughout Rupert Everett’s superb film, a movie which through that tale’s presence acknowledges, as best it can, that its most important, most resonant words must be Wilde’s own. He is being given his say as his life ends, as it does in this movie, in a fairy tale of sorts. We are left at the end, as we are at the end of the story of The Happy Prince, in some sort of wonder.
I would add only that the movie’s near collage-like editing at times, its often subdued lighting, rooms raucous with human behavior filmed as if candle lit, its telling use of grays and browns and unsettling yellows, all add to its power, the telling acuteness of Everett’s script intensified by his eye.
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Top reviews from other countries
leticia
Llegó en el tiempo acordado y en perfecto estado
Reviewed in Mexico on March 29, 2019
Victor K
compelling yet sad and uplifting at the same time
Reviewed in Australia on September 22, 2020