Rupert Everett stars and makes his directing debut in The Happy Prince, an international period biopic of the final years of Oscar Wilde’s life. I was eager to support Everett’s passion project because he hasn’t been on American screens as often since he came out though his acting skill has never diminished; however I noticed that the showings would drop precipitously during its second week of showing so I managed to squeeze it in after a busy, but short work day. If you are not familiar with Wilde or Everett’s work, I would not rush to the theater, especially since the film is not exactly an approachable or easy introduction to either.
The title is based on one of Wilde’s stories for children, and I was unfamiliar with it. This story winds its way throughout the film and acts as an unofficial framework for The Happy Prince. I often lost the thread of the story since it fades in and out of focus throughout the film so some moments felt like revelations by the end, but it also accidentally detracted from my focus of the story in the forefront. This story within a story could have been intentionally added to discombobulate viewers and further enhance the viewer’s ability to relate to Wilde.
I’m not sure if it is a function of age, but if the opening requires reading, it needs to stay on screen long enough to read it twice: once to read it, and the second time to digest and understand it. I’m a lawyer, and I was a bit taken aback by the revelation that a civil suit suddenly transformed into a criminal case against the plaintiff. I’m unfamiliar with any name other than Wilde’s, and we get a lot of background on two people’s strong feelings, negative or positive, about Wilde during the first scene of The Happy Prince. I never quite found my footing before the proceedings started then I spent the early part of the movie struggling to remember these names and determine whether anyone on screen who wasn’t Everett was either the lover or his relative, which made me unable to just enjoy the movie in front of me or get to know other characters as well because I kept waiting for the inevitable introduction of the great love of his life. At home, I could have pressed pause or turned on closed captioning, but as a theatrical experience, the movie never established firm ground before shifting locations and times so I could never fully abandon myself to the movie, which could have been Everett’s intent. He probably wanted the viewer to empathize with Wilde’s insecurity.
If an opening has that much information that is germane to the plot, maybe it should be shown instead of read. I praise Everett for taking the counterintuitive impulse and not spending his time depicting litigation, which is often done badly by most films. I also applaud Everett for depicting Wilde at his nadir instead of his glorious moments. He is unflinching in sparing us no sordidness and still expecting sympathy for the literary icon. It is as if Everett never heard of respectability politics. Also unlike Colette, I was relieved that when Wilde is depicted in other countries, there are actually French and Italian people in those scenes, and the respective languages are actually spoken. Everett is not a lazy creator. He just isn’t very apt at infecting his viewer with the same passion and reverence that he feels towards Wilde.
A pitfall of knowing and caring a lot about a subject is that it is harder to communicate about that subject to a layman. By all accounts, Everett has inhabited Wilde and his work longer than anyone except the actual person himself. Also being a first time director while simultaneously being on screen, regardless of how great an actor you are, an indisputable fact in Everett’s case, can be challenging and not everyone has the same success as Clint Eastwood or Kenneth Branagh and even they have occasionally failed themselves. Even the great Robert Duvall only managed to do both well once though he did attempt to do both four other times. Everett’s performance in The Happy Prince is completely transformative. Only Everett’s voice is recognizable. There is an absence of vanity, and I would compare him to Vincent D’Onofrio in terms of physicality.
For a movie about the final tragic days of Wilde, The Happy Prince never slows down long enough to appreciate his performance or the visual statement that he is trying to make. If I could eliminate one thing from all stories, it is the use of the How We Got Here trope in narratives. Everett does not necessarily begin his story at the end, but close to it. Initially I didn’t mind because the flashbacks were initially flashes to compare and contrast his past to his present situation and reveal how far he had fallen. Then we land in the past and the movie mostly moves forward until we arrive at the time period introduced at the beginning of the movie. There are flashbacks within flashbacks, and while the story is mostly told from Wilde’s perspective, it occasionally shows events from other people’s perspectives without Wilde being present; however he is the unofficial narrator as his children’s story winds through the entire film so how could he know about his wife’s exchange with their children’s guardian or his posthumous fight for his affections? These factors aren’t huge problems, but a narrative has to have an internal logic, and the mind will at least subconsciously feel this dissonance throughout the story. There does not have to be a narrator, and it does not have to be from Wilde’s perspective, but it is better to pick a theme then stick with it than using different narrative styles throughout the movie. There is nothing wrong with going in chronological order. A judicious use of flashbacks can provide a helpful function to explore the present otherwise it is simply a shifting of puzzle pieces.
The Happy Prince was definitely revisiting different themes by revisiting different locales to compare and contrast his treatment at different points in time: train stations, churches and Christmas dinners. Everett sets Wilde up as a kind of secular Christ figure on the road to Golgotha suffering for the love of man, literally instead of figuratively. He even has an awesome metaphorical flip the table moment, which was uncharacteristic for a man who used his words as weapons. There is one sumptuous oneiric encounter, which worked for me, and I loved that Everett gave a horror movie treatment to the romantic elements of the story. Tom Wilkinson has the best cameo with a little Easter Egg for eagle eyed viewers to The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
I usually love stories about death and aging. I am rooting for Everett. I love films about underrepresented parts of the population that are LGBTQ. I think that we need to learn more about their role in history. I still didn’t enjoy or get a chance to strongly empathize with Wilde. The Happy Prince needed to take a pace more suitable to that time of life instead of hurtling towards the end.
The title is based on one of Wilde’s stories for children, and I was unfamiliar with it. This story winds its way throughout the film and acts as an unofficial framework for The Happy Prince. I often lost the thread of the story since it fades in and out of focus throughout the film so some moments felt like revelations by the end, but it also accidentally detracted from my focus of the story in the forefront. This story within a story could have been intentionally added to discombobulate viewers and further enhance the viewer’s ability to relate to Wilde.
I’m not sure if it is a function of age, but if the opening requires reading, it needs to stay on screen long enough to read it twice: once to read it, and the second time to digest and understand it. I’m a lawyer, and I was a bit taken aback by the revelation that a civil suit suddenly transformed into a criminal case against the plaintiff. I’m unfamiliar with any name other than Wilde’s, and we get a lot of background on two people’s strong feelings, negative or positive, about Wilde during the first scene of The Happy Prince. I never quite found my footing before the proceedings started then I spent the early part of the movie struggling to remember these names and determine whether anyone on screen who wasn’t Everett was either the lover or his relative, which made me unable to just enjoy the movie in front of me or get to know other characters as well because I kept waiting for the inevitable introduction of the great love of his life. At home, I could have pressed pause or turned on closed captioning, but as a theatrical experience, the movie never established firm ground before shifting locations and times so I could never fully abandon myself to the movie, which could have been Everett’s intent. He probably wanted the viewer to empathize with Wilde’s insecurity.
If an opening has that much information that is germane to the plot, maybe it should be shown instead of read. I praise Everett for taking the counterintuitive impulse and not spending his time depicting litigation, which is often done badly by most films. I also applaud Everett for depicting Wilde at his nadir instead of his glorious moments. He is unflinching in sparing us no sordidness and still expecting sympathy for the literary icon. It is as if Everett never heard of respectability politics. Also unlike Colette, I was relieved that when Wilde is depicted in other countries, there are actually French and Italian people in those scenes, and the respective languages are actually spoken. Everett is not a lazy creator. He just isn’t very apt at infecting his viewer with the same passion and reverence that he feels towards Wilde.
A pitfall of knowing and caring a lot about a subject is that it is harder to communicate about that subject to a layman. By all accounts, Everett has inhabited Wilde and his work longer than anyone except the actual person himself. Also being a first time director while simultaneously being on screen, regardless of how great an actor you are, an indisputable fact in Everett’s case, can be challenging and not everyone has the same success as Clint Eastwood or Kenneth Branagh and even they have occasionally failed themselves. Even the great Robert Duvall only managed to do both well once though he did attempt to do both four other times. Everett’s performance in The Happy Prince is completely transformative. Only Everett’s voice is recognizable. There is an absence of vanity, and I would compare him to Vincent D’Onofrio in terms of physicality.
For a movie about the final tragic days of Wilde, The Happy Prince never slows down long enough to appreciate his performance or the visual statement that he is trying to make. If I could eliminate one thing from all stories, it is the use of the How We Got Here trope in narratives. Everett does not necessarily begin his story at the end, but close to it. Initially I didn’t mind because the flashbacks were initially flashes to compare and contrast his past to his present situation and reveal how far he had fallen. Then we land in the past and the movie mostly moves forward until we arrive at the time period introduced at the beginning of the movie. There are flashbacks within flashbacks, and while the story is mostly told from Wilde’s perspective, it occasionally shows events from other people’s perspectives without Wilde being present; however he is the unofficial narrator as his children’s story winds through the entire film so how could he know about his wife’s exchange with their children’s guardian or his posthumous fight for his affections? These factors aren’t huge problems, but a narrative has to have an internal logic, and the mind will at least subconsciously feel this dissonance throughout the story. There does not have to be a narrator, and it does not have to be from Wilde’s perspective, but it is better to pick a theme then stick with it than using different narrative styles throughout the movie. There is nothing wrong with going in chronological order. A judicious use of flashbacks can provide a helpful function to explore the present otherwise it is simply a shifting of puzzle pieces.
The Happy Prince was definitely revisiting different themes by revisiting different locales to compare and contrast his treatment at different points in time: train stations, churches and Christmas dinners. Everett sets Wilde up as a kind of secular Christ figure on the road to Golgotha suffering for the love of man, literally instead of figuratively. He even has an awesome metaphorical flip the table moment, which was uncharacteristic for a man who used his words as weapons. There is one sumptuous oneiric encounter, which worked for me, and I loved that Everett gave a horror movie treatment to the romantic elements of the story. Tom Wilkinson has the best cameo with a little Easter Egg for eagle eyed viewers to The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
I usually love stories about death and aging. I am rooting for Everett. I love films about underrepresented parts of the population that are LGBTQ. I think that we need to learn more about their role in history. I still didn’t enjoy or get a chance to strongly empathize with Wilde. The Happy Prince needed to take a pace more suitable to that time of life instead of hurtling towards the end.
