***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Frances O’Connor, Reese Witherspoon, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Anna Massey, and Edward Fox.
Directed & written for the screen by Oliver Parker, from the play by Oscar Wilde.
2002 PG13
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2002
There are enough similarities between “The Importance of Being Earnest” from 2002 and “An Ideal Husband” from 1999 that it’s tempting to lump them together in the same review. Both are directed and written for the screen by Oliver Parker, both are based on plays by Oscar Wilde, and both feature Rupert Everett as a decadent but clever man of means. Both films are also charming, brightly-paced, and absolutely carefree with Wilde’s dialogue, which is precisely how it should be treated. “The Importance of Being Earnest” isn’t so much about plot or about anything being accomplished, but more about people so in love with being wits (the nineteenth-century term for “smart ass”) that they turn conversations into competitions. In the hands of bad wits talk would be a series of loud boasts, one after another, but in the hands of director Parker and his charming cast, conversation becomes a competition to see who can toss off his obnoxious remarks the most carelessly and the most lightly.
Set in London of the 1920s, “The Importance of Being Earnest” follows two friends (Rupert Everett and Colin Firth) over the course of a few days as the exploits of their fake identities come back to haunt them. Jack (Colin Firth) is a wealthy landowner who, when bored with country life, claims that his wastrel brother Ernest needs him in London. Ernest, of course, does not exist, except when Jack is in London pretending to be him. Because Ernest is such a lout Jack never feels compelled to pay any of Ernest’s bills. Algernon (Rupert Everett) is responsible for a similar deception. He is a Londoner who, when hounded by bill collectors or his aunt Lady Bracknell (Dame Judi Dench), claims that he must visit his invalid friend Bunbury in the country. Bunbury is as fictitious as Jack’s brother Ernest and is only an excuse to get away. Complications arise when Jack (as Ernest) falls in love with Algie’s cousin Gwendolen (Frances O’Connor). Further complications arise when Algie shows up at Jack’s country estate claiming to be the wastrel brother Ernest and falls in love with Jack’s young ward Cecily (Reese Witherspoon). And even more complications arise when Lady Bracknell refuses to let Jack marry her daughter Gwendolen because Jack is an orphan who was found, as an infant, in a handbag at a train station.
Most of “Earnest” takes place at Jack’s country manor, and there are mistaken identities and revelations, and attempts by the boys to please their girls once the girls find out what cads their boys have been. Even bad actors could probably make a good movie out Wilde’s play, but Parker’s “Importance of Being Earnest” has assembled a very capable cast. Everett plays Algie as a joker who never knows when the joke’s gone too far, and is only too happy to impersonate Jack’s spendthrift brother, while Firth is his perfect foil as a man who likes to make snappy quips but turns serious and self-pitying faster than he should. Dench’s approach to the material is so funny because it is the precise opposite of Firth and Everett. While they make absurd remarks with a touch of irony and self-deprecation she speaks with absolute sincerity when making pontifications such as “thirty-five is a good age for women, so good in fact that many women remain thirty-five for years of their own free choice.” Reese Witherspoon, as Cecily, is bright-eyed and blinking, and lives in a fantasy world of knights and wizards, which would be amusing enough if she only spoke of it, but proves hilarious when Parker lets her imaginings be acted out on screen. Frances O’Connor (the mother from “A.I.”) plays Gwendolen as a proper upper-class woman smoldering with carefully pent-up sexuality; just watch as she sinks one of her claws into a chair as she talks to Jack about how she can’t wait for their marital bliss to begin. Anna Massey and Oscar-nominee Tom Wilkinson share a late-blooming flirtation as Cecily’s tutor and the local vicar, and the sweet awkwardness and sincerity of their interactions is a nice contrast to the fencing and wordplay perpetrated by the younger couples. And there’s Edward Fox as Algie’s butler, whose near-perfect pessimism may well have inspired Marvin the Paranoid Android in Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Like “An Ideal Husband,” all the costumes and sets are lavish and perfect, from the bowties and cravats to the well-manicured estates and gorgeous interior spaces. But more important than looking pretty, the players in “Earnest” are completely at ease in their surroundings; they do not simply stand and talk but know the rooms and behave as if they have dressed this way every day of their lives. They also appear perfectly at home listening to the film’s delightful soundtrack by Charlie Mole, which recreates the sounds of the roaring twenties, somewhere after ragtime but before big band.
The ending of “Earnest” may not be entirely satisfactory for some viewers, but it is the way Wilde wrote it, down to the absurd coincidences that crop up in the last fifteen minutes as a sort of deus ex machina. Parker handles the blinding, improbable revelations as best as they could possibly be handled, and things end well for the good and badly for the bad (this, as Cecily’s tutor points out, is the nature of all fiction). In the parking lot after the end credits a friend of mine compared “Earnest” to Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of “Much Ado About Nothing,” and I can think of no higher praise for it.
Finished June 23, 2002
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night