A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Braugher exits "Homicide"; Ani DiFranco on "King of the Hill" The Judas Kiss Liam Neeson hangs fire as Oscar Wilde in David Hare's new play Woo Jada Pinkett Smith stars in this sexy, sunny comedy Y E S T E R D A Y The importance of being Wilde By Cynthia Joyce An interview with Britain's new Renaissance man, Stephen Fry Deep Impact Reviewed by Charles Taylor The end of the world as Hallmark moment R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Home Movies By Charles Taylor Why "Rio Bravo" is the Great American Movie (05/05/98) He Got Game Reviewed by Gary Kamiya Spike Lee's soft-hearted but moving tribute to faith, love and basketball (05/01/98) Les Miserables A high-minded film version of Victor Hugo's epic tale of crime and obsession (05/01/98) Two Girls and a Guy Reviewed by Charles Taylor Tale of a womanizer and the women who confront him has brains and unrestrained eroticism (04/24/98) Sliding Doors Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek Gwyneth Paltrow misses her train and forever alters her life in this romantic comedy (04/24/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

NOT WILDE ENOUGH | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Wilde's life invites the same prurient rubbernecking and moral browbeating as Clinton's current sex scandal. Both provide arenas in which people can debate the conventional (but widely ignored) morality of the day, seek out truth through sexual biography and gape at the probing drama of a politicized court case. Moreover, Wilde's life story has so many complexities and is so well documented that it can be tailored to practically any narrative form. Those yearning to create a Greek tragedy can cast him as a modern-day Oedipus, a noble man destroyed by a fatal flaw. The melodramatists can paint a portrait of nobility in the face of a vengeful father, a manipulative lover and a tyrannical state. Those in search of postmodern ambiguities will find them in abundance -- his adamant denial, at his trial, that he engaged in homosexual behavior while simultaneously singing the praises of Greek man-boy love still has scholars scratching their heads. "He was never quite sure himself where and when he was serious," remarked his first lover and friend Robbie Ross. Wilde's famous wit, proto-gay identity, hunger for self-reinvention and tragic embodiment of celebrity echo so many of our own fin-de-siècle concerns that it was inevitable that at some point we would turn to his life as a mirror of our culture. What's confounding, however, is how utterly un-Wildean most of these tributes are. As compelling, tragic and downright juicy as the details of Wilde's life were, their dramatic counterparts have a universally undramatic and dutiful sheen to them. They set about capturing the "true Wilde," and avoiding the stereotype of a flaming dandy, with such earnest diligence that they cease to evoke his merry, wicked, unsentimental spirit. As Wilde wrote: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." Considering they are about a man who once planned to create a society opposed to virtue, such highly moral tributes -- despite their historical accuracy -- feel strangely clueless. Brian Gilbert's "Wilde," which is based on Ellman's biography, tries hard to be true to the many ambiguities of Wilde's life, but it finally bites off more Oscar than anyone can chew in 116 minutes. The movie begins in Colorado, with Wilde on an American lecture tour, delivering a talk on "The English Renaissance" in the bowels of a silver mine. It then skips forward (with no explanation or sense of why Wilde was lecturing to miners in the wild West) to his meeting with and courtship of Constance Lloyd in London, at the beginning of his rising career as a playwright, novelist and critic. In this spotty fashion, it traces a full 17 years of Wilde's life, from the homosexual love affair of Wilde and Bosie to the trials, and all the way through his two years of hard labor. The form is meant to be epic: Sweeping views of nature, a swelling orchestral score, beautiful sets and costumes collide with naked bodies in that New-World-sexiness-brought-to-Old-World-stories way. Perhaps because it's based on a biography, the play moves forward at a peculiar synoptic pace: a scene here, a scene a year later, a transition and another scene three years later. Despite the male love scenes, it has a chaste PBS aesthetic, with our hero always embodying the very height of reason and good intentions. Fry brings an intelligent and empathetic quality to his Wilde, but too often he must play out scenes in which he is the noble, wide-eyed and long-suffering audience to Bosie's tantrums. This not only makes Wilde appear passive, but the relationship between him and Bosie never seems credible. In one scene in which Wilde, sick in bed, asks Bosie for a drink of water, Bosie throws a fit, breaks some crockery and calls him an old man. "I only asked for a drink of water," Wilde responds pathetically. The play de-emphasizes Wilde's intellectual development, concentrating on the triangle between his wife, depicted as a sweet-natured and submissive creature, and his lover Bosie, the temperamental Adonis of his dreams. The closest thing the movie has to a point of view is a tendentious and mystifying voice-over, in which Fry reads excerpts from Wilde's fairy tale about a selfish giant who banishes his children from his garden. Perhaps this leitmotif is supposed to show the harm Wilde is doing to his children (who are often shown playing alone wistfully), but this only frosts the piety with a layer of moralism. It may have been true that Wilde put up with Bosie's antics, and that his children did miss his long absences, but as Oscar Wilde well knew, just because it's true doesn't make it interesting. As Dwight Garner argues in his review, David Hare's "The Judas Kiss" suffers from a similar deadening monumentality by presenting a Wilde who is finally too deliberate to be very entertaining. Not all of Wilde's reincarnations do damage to the dead man's infamous image. In "Gross Indecency" Michael Emerson, who is neither tall nor lumbering, nevertheless carves a fascinating, eccentric and imaginative character from his role. Wilde once wrote that "art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic," and playwright Moises Kaufman appears to have taken this to heart. The play is not a smooth narrative and, at times, it suffers from the maudlin hindsight of a century that knows better. But of all the Wildes currently on tap, his offers the most nuanced and complex rendition. Cobbled together almost entirely from transcripts, autobiographies, letters and primary sources about the three trials, it demands that the audience wake up and judge Wilde -- as a man, a lover and finally a gay icon -- for itself. The play is successful in part because it narrows the scope of Oscar's life. Actors engage in no dialogue but simply read from the sources, holding up the quoted book or manuscript in their hands. Between the first and second documentary act, there is an entr'acte in which a journalist interviews a gay scholar on the place of Oscar Wilde in history. The scene is worthy of Wilde: an acid yet ambiguous satire of academia that questions whether a man who always angrily denied his physical and romantic love for other men should be made into a gay saint. The domestication of Oscar epitomizes the dangers of our current make-nice culture. Embracing perversity can also draw the delicious, vital poison from it. In his time, Wilde was first known as a celebrity, a man of paradoxical, passionate views and velvet knee breaches. Anyone this flamboyant must have been at times a royal pain in the ass. Walt Whitman called him a "fine handsome youngster," and Henry James described him as "an unclean beast." Later he was praised for his devastating wit and literary genius, but few rhapsodized about his saintliness. Wilde did come to a tragic end, but the spirit of his life was one of unsuppressed vitality. As he gazes down -- or up -- at these well-meaning, irreproachably sincere portraits of himself, Wilde must be tossing in his grave. SALON | May 8, 1998