CINEMA: Dorian Gray

Anybody filming Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray faces a real dilemma; should they show the portrait of Gray as his debauched ways change it into a hellish monstrosity, or should they not show it and leave it up to the audience’s own imagination as to what it looks like?

Either way they’re damned because if they do show it it can’t possibly live up to everyone’s expectations and if they don’t the audience are bound to be disappointed they didn’t get a look see. In fact, it is the portrait of Dorian that proves to be the disappointing note in director Oliver Parker’s handsomely-made production.

Rising star Ben Barnes plays the beautiful Dorian, an unspoiled young man who inherits a vast fortune. Unused to the ways of society, he is taken under the wing of bored social mover and shaker Lord Henry Wotton (Colin Firth) whose interest is piqued. Can he mould Dorian into the morally corrupt, debauched libertine he himself would like to be – if only he had the courage?

He decides to give it a try and soon has Dorian believing that ‘the only two things worth having are “youth and beauty”. So Dorian makes a pact with the devil; he will sell his soul to the dark side, but only if he can retain his looks and never age. Dorian embarks on a life of orgies, trips to opium dens and even murder, and indeed never ages. However, up in the attic, something awful is happening to the beautiful portrait of him, painted by Basil Hallward (Ben Chaplin).

Although Oliver Parker has over-emphasised the homoerotic charge of the book, it looks extremely elegant and there are some lovely performances, especially from Firth who has never been better than as louche Lord Wotton.

However, the portrait slowly morphs into a decidedly porcine caricature, more comic than scary, and maybe it really would have been better to never see it in its final incarnation.

Dee Pilgrim