Film Review: Dorian Gray (2009)
Posted on | July 27, 2010 | No Comments
Dorian Gray (2009)
Directed by Jon Cunningham
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Dorian Gray (Ben Barnes) is a young, innocent country gentleman who arrives in London and becomes the subject of a campaign of corruption and induction into cynicism by the highborn, civilly sordid Harry Wotton (Colin Firth). As Dorian commits sin after sin, a beautiful portrait drawn after he first arrived in the city begins to show the signs of his wounds, his age, and his wanton lifestyle, while he himself remains young and beautiful.
The film stays quite true to the original story by Oscar Wilde. Filmed in beautiful smothered colours, with a powerful score, it draws in the viewer much like a pretty but inconsequential painting might. Nothing in the storytelling distracts from the tale. Firth and Barnes do justice to their parts. Firth strikes the right note both as a wicked man on the edge of middle-age, and as a responsible elderly father. Barnes manages to play an innocent, a hedonist and a villain, all, though the transition between these states is not always smooth. The script fails to marry these extremes into a logical continuum, and the effect is a somewhat disjointed storyline.
In this film, Dorian’s corruption comes across as something not only created by Harry, and also for Harry. Dorian’s embracing of sexual excess (for which he seems at first downright reluctant) and cynicism, and his eventual focusing on Harry’s progressive daughter (a delightful brief turn by Rebecca Hall) as someone who can save him from himself, are tied up with Harry in what could be a fixation on Harry as a substitute father or as a longed-for lover, or both. The final conflict between them brings this into clear focus, and also juxtaposes their inverse moral (or social) development.
As it is based on a novel from a period of Victorian double morality, sex and violence are shown as equivalent sins and indelibly linked. Dorian’s first crime is cheating on and then abandoning his pregnant, low-born fiancée (Rachel Hurd-Wood), and that keeps haunting him a long time after, even when direct murder doesn’t. A life lived “for nothing but pleasure” leaves his picture gnarled and monstrous, suggesting venereal diseases, which could be construed as Mother Nature’s punishment for the Biblical sin of promiscuity. This doesn’t pack quite the punch these days as it used to, but the film does make an effort to describe the key change in Dorian as cruelty. The final message is a surprisingly Christian one: Dorian cannot be absolved while he still fails to confess his sins.
Although I found the film enjoyable and a good central moral dilemma, whether you think it’s legitimate, is always going to be fascinating to watch, the film may be too sombre for some tastes, and it is a bit too shallow considering the psychological potential of the setting. Nonetheless, it was a better than average and a fairly faithful adaptation of a classic novel in a pretty, easy-to-consume package.
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Bechdel test:
1. It has at least two female characters,
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.
I think this may be a pass! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think a young lady and her mother talk about correct presentation at her coming-out ball, before Dorian screws them both for a bet. It would be kind of hard to have a more faily pass, though.
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