The Importance of Being Earnest
Comedy | Rated PG | 2002

For a playwright who was imprisoned for two years for the "gross indecency" of being homosexual, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was a pretty funny guy. Earnest is rightly considered to be the peak of Wilde's wit, and the 1952 film version, with an indelible performance by Dame Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell, deserves landmark status. So why remake it? From the looks of this freewheeling, loose-limbed take on Earnest, writer-director Oliver Parker, who also filmed Wilde's An Ideal Husband, wanted to blow the dust off, air the thing out and take a few cheeky liberties. 

Which is fine - mostly. Dame Judi Dench splendidly fills in for Dame Edith with her own less madcap but equally hilarious take on Lady Bracknell, a woman who will not endure trickery. And yet here we have Algy (Rupert Everett), who loves Cecily (Reese Witherspoon), and his friend Jack (Colin Firth), who loves Gwendolin (Frances O'Connor), both pretending to be the nonexistent Ernest? Don't ask why. The plot is just an excuse on which to hang Wilde's bons mots. Everett, whose scenes with Firth are a droll delight, nails every sly laugh. And Witherspoon adds her own legally blond American sparkle to this British party. Parker pushes a bit - who knew Earnest had a love duet sung by Algy and Jack? - but he proves this vintage bubbly hasn't lost its fizz. 

PETER TRAVERS

© Rolling Stone  2002
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The most important thing about an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's ``The Importance of Being Earnest'' is to present characters who bring a sense of, well, earnestness. 

Oliver Parker's latest take on Wilde manages that only about half the time, mainly with female leads Reese Witherspoon, Frances O'Connor and the wonderfully imperious Judi Dench. 

The keys to the whole works Colin Firth and Rupert Everett as the two men alternately pretending to be an imaginary chap named Ernest come across as glum and listless. They should be deliriously assaulting Wilde's spicy dialogue, but their muted readings deflate Wilde's outrageous, Shakespearian premise of mistaken identity. 

Parker directed the 1999 crowd-pleasing Wilde adaptation ``An Ideal Husband,'' whose charm hinged largely on a buoyant performance by Everett. But Parker is unable to light the same sparks with ``The Importance of Being Earnest.'' 

Unlike Anthony Asquith's outstanding 1952 version, a fairly straightforward transformation from stage to screen, Parker makes bold but miscalculated choices in expanding the story cinematically. 

Quick cuts, especially early on as the principals and their interrelationships are introduced, butcher the pacing of Wilde's playful speech, which would have been better served by lingering to let the verbal fireworks mount. 

Parker also punctuates the wordplay by inserting the characters into brief fantasy images, clever renderings of the classical tableaux common to Victorian society types who would dress up as knights and damsels and Roman lovers for entertainment. Yet here, the images are so curt and dramatically inert, they jar the audience out of the story. They're an unnecessary gimmick to visually gussy up a story that can stand just fine on its rich verbiage alone. 

Firth plays bachelor No. 1, Jack Worthing, a wealthy, respectable bloke charged with the upbringing of his romantically fanciful 18-year-old niece, Cecily Cardew (Witherspoon). 

Jack periodically travels from his country estate to London, telling his household he must mop up the latest mess left by his ne'er-do-well brother, Ernest. In truth, Ernest doesn't exist; he's Jack's excuse to blow off steam. While in London, Jack becomes Ernest, stiffing restaurants on dinner bills, hanging out with rash and wild bachelor No. 2 Algy Moncreef (Everett) and otherwise giving gadabouts a bad name. 

As Ernest, Jack has fallen for Gwendolen Fairfax (Frances O'Connor), a daring modern woman fixated on marrying a man named Ernest. 

Jack's fictitious persona aside, all seems well for the couple until his prospective-bridegroom interview with Gwendolen's autocratic mother, Lady Bracknell (Dench), who dashes his hopes when she learns of his mysterious origin (Jack was found in a handbag at Victoria Station as an infant, with no decent relations to claim him). 

Running from creditors, Algy visits Jack's country home, posing as the master's wayward brother and ending up in his own Ernest-challenged romance with Cecily, a prelude to the farcical unraveling of just who is and who isn't Ernest. 

Dench barks Wilde's dialogue with wicked glee, while Witherspoon (copping an impressive British accent) and O'Connor bring an air of elated silliness to the heroines. 

Tom Wilkinson as the local parson and Anna Massey as Cecily's tutor spice things up as a clumsily enamored couple, roles Parker beefed up from a rare four-act version of Wilde's play. 

Firth and Everett appear ponderous and dull next to their cast mates, as unrascally a pair of rascals imaginable. If Parker's failed attempt to augment the play for the screen undermines the heart of ``Earnest,'' the lethargy of Jack and Algy finishes it off. 

``The Importance of Being Earnest,'' a Miramax release, is rated PG for mild sensuality. Running time: 94 minutes. Two stars out of four. 
 

© AP News Services  2002
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By KEVIN THOMAS, Times Staff Writer 

Since Oliver Parker so successfully directed and adapted Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" to the screen in 1999, there was every reason to hope that he would do the same with "The Importance of Being Earnest." But this time he chose not to stick with the visual elegance and crisp, taut direction that worked so well the first time around, taking a freer and easier approach that's at odds with Wilde's epigrammatic dialogue and tight construction. 

After a steady start, this "Earnest" commences losing energy and pace, so crucial to keeping Wilde alive, and the film tends to meander until it begins to build tension again for its hilariously intricate denouement. 

In short, Parker's larky approach too often jars with the precision of the material, a feeling reinforced by Charlie Mole's score, which evokes 1940s swing music that, while pleasant and lively in itself, has no connection with an 1895 comedy. The result is a film " that is at best highly uneven and perversely at odds with itself. 

Luckily, Wilde's delicious sense of absurdity and peerlessly witty dialogue are pretty indestructible, and "Earnest" itself remains a peerless comedy of manners. 

Rupert Everett is Algernon Moncrieff, the foppish, chronically but imperturbably insolvent man about London, and Colin Firth is his best friend, John Worthing, whose decision to call himself Ernest in town and Jack in the country, the better to facilitate his moving between high society and low life, triggers the plot's myriad complications. 

Problems multiply when the name Ernest becomes so crucial to the attraction Gwendolen Fairfax (Frances O'Connor) feels for Jack--and also in the way Cecily Cardew (Reese Witherspoon) responds to Algy, who has also appropriated the name Ernest for himself. 

Judi Dench has some of Wilde's funniest lines as the very grand, obtuse and frivolous Lady Bracknell, who at one point declares, "The chin a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high, just at present." It's the kind of pronouncement that fashion arbiter Diana Vreeland would make--but with a deliberate sense of outrageousness. 

The entire cast is enjoyable but Anna Massey as Cecily's tutor, Miss Prism, and Tom Wilkinson as Reverend Chasuble, who love each other from afar, capture the delicious spirit of Wildean foolishness most fully. 

Not surprisingly, there are some glorious sets and costumes--Lady Bracknell's London mansion is but a tad less grand than Buckingham Palace--but this "Importance of Being Earnest" is not as glorious as it should be. 

* * * 
MPAA-rated: PG, for mild sensuality. Times guidelines. Sophisticated family fare. 

'The Importance of Being Earnest' 
Colin Firth: John (Jack) Worthing 
Rupert Everett: Algernon (Algy) Moncrieff 
Frances O'Connor: Gwendolen Fairfax 
Reese Witherspoon: Cecily Cardew 
Dame Judi Dench: Lady Bracknell 
Anna Massey: Miss Prism 
Tom Wilkinson: Rev. Canon Chasuble 

A Miramax Films and Ealing Studios presentation in association with Film Council and Newmarket Capital Group of a Fragile Film. Writer-director Oliver Parker. Based on the play by Oscar Wilde. Producer Barnaby Thompson. Co-producer David Brown. Executive producer Uri Fruchtmann. Cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts. Editor Guy Bensley. Music Charlie Mole. Costumes Mauriizio Millenotti. Make-up & hair designer Peter King. Production designer Luciana Arrighi. Set decorator Ian Whittaker. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes. 

Exclusively at the Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 477-5581; and the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; opening wider Friday. 

© Copyright LA Times  2002
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Subtitled "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People," The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde's airiest confection, a bite-sized meringue delectable with melt-in-your-mouth epigrams. Though its tart center tastes of class resentment and the exhaustion of necessary dissimulation, the play draws the sweetest of conclusions—namely, that self-invention is a natural phenomenon, and worthy of celebration. Winkingly focused on a pair of bachelor dandies juggling double identities, Wilde's drawing-room farce was also something of a cryptogram, and it happened to debut on the London stage the same year the writer's own design for living was so cruelly condemned. Earnest triumphantly opened in February 1895 and sheepishly closed in May, during Wilde's trials for "gross indecency"; weeks later, he entered Reading Gaol, and never wrote another work for the stage. 

For Oliver Parker, the importance of adapting Earnest lies in the text—not the context, and certainly not the subtext. Much like his previous Oscar screener, An Ideal Husband, Parker's rendition—the first production to be released under the Ealing Studios banner in 57 years—is a proficient skim of the Man With the Green Carnation's wit and wisdom, piped by an able crew of quick-tongued ventriloquists. (The hits don't quit: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune . . . to lose both seems like carelessness." "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing." "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. . . . No man does. That is his.") Jack (Colin Firth) maintains separate personae in town and country, as does his friend Algy (Rupert Everett), a form of social compartmentalizing that the latter curiously dubs "Bunburying." (The Bunburyist's predilections are left unspecified in the play; the film pegs them as cigarettes and cancan dancers.) In the guise of is alter ego, "Ernest," Jack is smitten with Algy's horny cousin, Gwendolen (Frances O'Connor), while Algy, appropriating the Ernest mantle for himself, falls for his buddy's bright-eyed ward, Cecily (Reese Witherspoon). The women become rivals, then allies when they discover their mutual entanglement with lovers that dare not speak their names. 

Parker pads Earnest's avowedly slight figure with fantasy sequences, flashbacks, chase scenes, even an ill-fated trip to the tattoo parlor, and the stuffing shows. Indeed, for a handsomely financed Miramax production, the movie is ribboned with crooked seams: muddy sound, glaring continuity errors, a mischievous boom mic, Everett's suddenly AWOL mustache. Though Parker ranges far from the the play's series of confined spaces, there's no visual wit or blocking savvy—surely no one was minding the bakery when a comically foolproof contretemps between Jack and nervous eater Algy entailing 12 invocations of the word "muffins" was allowed to collapse on the screen like a traumatized cake. 

Tonally, however, Earnest boasts perfect pitch, thanks mainly to the blithe, nimble actors. Everett and Firth's ruefully affectionate, roughhousing chemistry feels decades lived-in (actually, they co-starred as fellow Marxist misfits in Another Country nearly 20 years ago), Witherspoon's matter-of-fact daftness keeps daydreamy Cecily tethered to earth, and you will know Judi Dench by the trail of dead (as imperious Lady Bracknell, the mother of all mothers). Parker's Earnest certainly doesn't get in Wilde's way, but neither does it justify its own existence—what's the point of a mere face-value appropriation? Shakespeare gets a cine-update every other week, so isn't Oscar Wilde ready for his 21st-century close-up? 

© Copyright Village Voice  2002
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Whatever they’re saying, chances are Oscar Wilde said it first. Strangely, he didn’t say much in The Importance of Being Earnest, his most popular and enduring comedy, and a lot of what he did say is regretfully missing from the glossy new movie version by Oliver Parker, the same writer-director who put a fresh coat of varnish on Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. Despite the many liberties he takes to adapt Wilde’s arch style and dialogue to a movie for mass consumption, the delicious cast and a lot of cinematic "opening up" (gilt-edged theaters, posh cafés, jazzy music, the lush green English countryside and even a tattoo parlor!) conspire to turn a classic Victorian drawing-room comedy of manners into an enjoyable romp. Alas, it still pales in comparison to Anthony Asquith’s famous 1952 film version. 

Purists will insist that Mr. Asquith’s dry, stagy, eccentric but riotous film was the definitive one. Mr. Parker’s spin is so busy that it assumes a chirpy tempo of its own, more in keeping with the demands of modern audiences, but it loses a lot of the wit, attitude and elegance of Wilde’s subtle mastery of the language. And no matter how hard they try to knock themselves out being frisky and charming, the new cast can’t hold a candle to Michael Redgrave, Joan Greenwood, Dorothy Tutin, Michael Denison, Margaret Rutherford and especially Dame Edith Evans’ titanic aria as the maddeningly eccentric Lady Bracknell. Still, let us leave that landmark film in its resting place, preserved in memory and on the shelves of video stores, and concentrate on the 2002 remake. It offers pleasures of its own. 

Say what? Despite numerous Broadway revivals and even a musical version called Ernest in Love, you don’t remember what The Importance of Being Earnest is about? Utter silliness, that’s what. The fanciful plot—which even in 1895 gave new meaning to the word "contrived"—is a farce concerning two dashing, irresponsible London bachelors who both assume the name Ernest to woo the objects of their confused affections. 

Country squire Jack Worthing (Colin Firth) seeks the hand of the genteel but impulsive Gwendolen (Frances O’Connor) and comes to town to propose, but since she has always been attracted to the virility of the name Ernest, he passes himself off as a fictitious younger brother of the same name. Meanwhile, his arrogant, vain, extravagant cad of a pal, Algernon Moncrieff (Rupert Everett), also posing as Jack’s brother Ernest, heads for the country to romance Jack’s 18-year-old ward Cecily (Reese Witherspoon, with a brilliant and unaffected British accent that never falters). Clearly it’s impossible for 
hem to be in the same place at the same time. They can’t both be Ernest, although both ladies mistakenly think they’re engaged to the same man. 

A high point of the film occurs when the willful Gwendolen and the angelic Cecily pool their feminine wiles to bring their men to heel. Meanwhile, the delicate sauce of a plot thickens to pudding when the imperious Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen’s mother and Algernon’s aunt, dismisses Jack as a suitable candidate for her daughter’s hand because he was a foundling abandoned as an infant in a handbag in Victoria Station. When everyone descends unexpectedly upon Jack’s country manor, mistaken identities are revealed, scandals erupt and chaos ensues. The mystery of Jack’s birth is also solved, but not before Judi Dench’s Lady Bracknell—precise, intolerant, and snobbish to the manner born—has a cherished moment of regal hilarity when she looks down her nose and declares, "To lose one parent … may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." She is fine,
and God knows she can act, but to hear Dame Edith Evans say that same line in the 1952 film is to feel suddenly the full impact of Oscar Wilde’s treacherous wit and wisdom, and the weight, too, of Victorian class-consciousness, circa 1895. 

There are splendid turns by Anna Massey as Cecily’s pickled tutor Miss Prism, Edward Fox as Algernon’s long-suffering, underpaid butler, and Tom Wilkinson as the local rector who timidly pursues the sullen Miss Prism. What a tribute to his diversity and range. Curiously, Mr. Wilkinson also appeared as the beastly, violent, homophobic Marquess of Queensberry, who was responsible for Oscar Wilde’s downfall and imprisonment for "gross indecency," in the excellent biopic Wilde. Now he’s here playing one of Wilde’s shy little subsidiary characters with an amour fou of his own. 

Wilde might have enjoyed the newfangled camera work and even the jazz duet performed by Mr. Firth and Mr. Everett (unnecessary to the plot and utterly anachronistic), but I doubt he would have approved of the added bit where the ladylike Gwendolen has "Ernest" tattooed on her bum. 

Oscar Wilde aimed for truth over illusions. The eye candy in Oliver Parker’s version seems to favor style over sincerity. The film is a fragile frolic, but the real theme enjoyed by countless audiences through the years—the importance of being earnest instead of deceitful in matters of the heart—still shines through the frosting. 

© Copyright NY Observer 2002
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Being Earnest, and Honest (NY Times)

COLIN FIRTH says that the way things appear on screen is they way they are off screen, at least as far as RUPERT EVERETT, who co-stars with him in "The Importance of Being Earnest." They are pals, they kid around, and the character Mr. Everett plays is the one who lives well but has no money.

"That's our relationship in real life to a large extent," Mr. Firth said. "I mean, you know, affection and irritation and a long history. We go back to my first film." That was "Another Country," which, by the way, was Mr. Everett's third film.

Partly, this is a matter of disastrous casting. In the key role of Algernon, the preening, charmless Rupert Everett fails to move his upper lip enough to enunciate. He swallows, mumbles or otherwise destroys line after brilliant line. Parker also mishandles "Earnest" by trying to add action and visual scope, throwing a wrench into the play's rapid rhythms and threatening to turn it into a lame farce. 

The tedious process begins with the introductions of Algernon, an upper-class man about London first seen running from thuggish creditors, and his friend Jack (Colin Firth), who has come down from the country to get engaged. As they take tea, Algernon discovers that his friend has been leading a double life. In London, he is called Ernest; but in the country, everyone knows him as Jack, a serious fellow burdened by a rascally younger brother named Ernest. Algernon himself has invented a character named Bunbury, an ailing friend whom he uses as an excuse to avoid social obligations. 

These inventions have always worked well for the two young men. But when Jack/Ernest proposes to blue-blooded Gwendolyn (Frances O'Connor), and Algernon turns up at Jack's country house pretending to be Ernest and falls for Jack's ward, Cecily (Reese Witherspoon), things start to get complicated. Witherspoon pulls off a perfectly adequate accent and captures Cecily's combination of ingenuousness and candor. O'Connor more than redeems herself after "Bedazzled," investing the worldly Gwendolyn with a confident sexuality. 

Firth is fine as Jack, and you can hardly do better than Judi Dench as the snobbish Lady Bracknell. Unfortunately, Anna Massey and Tom Wilkinson go over the top in their roles as the prim governess and shy chaplain. Some of Parker's additions - hot-air balloons, anachronistic early automobiles and ragtime music - do no real harm. But the tattoo parlor, the hooker-infested dance hall - a labored effort to illustrate Victorian sexual hypocrisy, as if the play's dialogue didn't already do that exquisitely - miss the point that the play is supposed to be merely brilliant surface. Fortunately, enough of that brilliance shines through to make even this compromised "Earnest" a comic delight. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

Crass adaptation of the hilarious Wilde masterpiece.

Running time: 94 minutes. Rated PG (mild sensuality). At the Paris Theater, West 58th Street and Fifth Avenue