The Picture of Dorian Gray can probably never be dramatized satisfactorily. The BBC once did it faithfully, but without the narrative passages the story seemed even more incomplete than it had on the page. The novel reads like a partial reconstruction of a damaged original; Wilde tells the story with a curious reticence, so that many pivotal scenes go unwritten and the deterioration of Dorian's character is shown in suggestive vignettes rather than in its entirety. Part of this indirection was no doubt deliberate, to leave the supreme horror for the climax; and in that regard the author succeeds. However, he also introduces confusions: he states in his preface that there are no immoral books but proceeds to make a book the instrument of Dorian's corruption; and not only the painter Basil but Wilde himself seems to treat youth, beauty, and innocence as identical. Yet despite these and other weaknesses the novel evokes genuine distress--alarm mingled with sadness--in the scenes it does depict, such as Lord Henry's casually malicious temptation of Dorian and Dorian's equally casual and malicious casting aside of Sybil Vane. Some at least of this distress has come through in every film telling of the tale.
...until this one. When I first read the novel I found it vague in some respects, but when I turned back to it after seeing the film it seemed crystal clear. The motives for Dorian's descent into decadence were insufficiently described, perhaps insufficiently understood, by Wilde, but in the film, as portrayed by a particularly dull and lifeless Dorian, they don't exist at all, and despite the plethora of orgiastic detail one can't even tell what's supposed to be going on with him. His evil angel Lord Henry is all wrong: not Wilde's jaded amoralist but a stock Victorian villain, until he is made to have a change of conscience after Dorian takes up with his daughter (daughter?). This Lord Henry belongs in Dickens or Wilkie Collins rather than in Wilde. And then the film has Sybil Vane's brother meeting the young Dorian in person, making nonsense of their later encounter. Finally, in an especially poor stroke of judgment, the painted Dorian turns three-dimensional, pops out of the canvas, and tries to wring Dorian's neck. The filmmakers seem not to have understood that the ominous power of the painting lies in its painting-ness, its inanimate quality; bringing it to life renders it innocuous, as if a haunted house were to get up on its legs and dance. In all, this production tends to take on the air of a cartoon (and parts of it, like the computer-drawn buildings, are almost cartoons). It is certainly ambitious; but as a well-known wit once remarked, ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
...until this one. When I first read the novel I found it vague in some respects, but when I turned back to it after seeing the film it seemed crystal clear. The motives for Dorian's descent into decadence were insufficiently described, perhaps insufficiently understood, by Wilde, but in the film, as portrayed by a particularly dull and lifeless Dorian, they don't exist at all, and despite the plethora of orgiastic detail one can't even tell what's supposed to be going on with him. His evil angel Lord Henry is all wrong: not Wilde's jaded amoralist but a stock Victorian villain, until he is made to have a change of conscience after Dorian takes up with his daughter (daughter?). This Lord Henry belongs in Dickens or Wilkie Collins rather than in Wilde. And then the film has Sybil Vane's brother meeting the young Dorian in person, making nonsense of their later encounter. Finally, in an especially poor stroke of judgment, the painted Dorian turns three-dimensional, pops out of the canvas, and tries to wring Dorian's neck. The filmmakers seem not to have understood that the ominous power of the painting lies in its painting-ness, its inanimate quality; bringing it to life renders it innocuous, as if a haunted house were to get up on its legs and dance. In all, this production tends to take on the air of a cartoon (and parts of it, like the computer-drawn buildings, are almost cartoons). It is certainly ambitious; but as a well-known wit once remarked, ambition is the last refuge of the failure.