Rupert Everett has been trying to get is film script The Happy Prince, following Oscar Wilde’s last years, made for about ten years. With a lot of help from his friends he has at last done so and his portrayal of the man is superb, funny, heartbreaking and amazingly frank. This film is not a vanity project for Everett, it is a passion project, which he also directed and starred in. It is surely the most ambitious thing he has ever done and I think he ha done it very well.
The Happy Prince would not have been made, however, without the support and personal loyalty of some of Everett’s friends, particularly Colin Firth and Emily Watson, who literally ‘signed up’ for the movie years ago, plus Tom Wilkinson, a later recruit. Without these friends Everett is convinced it would never have got the production support from the BBC and distribution deal from Lionsgate it needed. It took ten years to get it made.
No other film bio has really followed Oscar after his release from Reading Jail on the 18thMay 1897 until his death on the 30thNovember 1900. These were deeply unhappy years, plagued by debt, persecution, ill health and his continuing obsession with Bosie Douglas. Everett sees Wilde as a kind of Christ Figure, bearing the sins of his time but opening up the possibility of Gay relationships being legalized 60 years after his death. It has been pointed out that in the late Victorian years it was not homosexuality that offended the ruling classes, not even the use of male or female prostitutes, but it was the fact that Wilde flaunted his relationship with an aristocrat, the Marquis of Queensbury’s son and heir, Bosie Douglas that causes his downfall. Even today, however, Everett sees the global Gay experience as repressive. In an interview with Total Film he spoke of the “much worse things that are still happening in Russia, India, China, Jamaica and even Italy. With the new waves of populism that are coming in, blowing across Europe, this brings with it all sorts of new things. The majority, again, start to look at the minority in a cruel way.” (Total FilmJuly 2018. p94) So this is in part a political film, and the delay in getting it made may be fortunate. This may be the right time for it.
For many of us Everett leapt out of the screen as the real-life playboy David Blakely, who was shot dead by his lover Ruth Ellis in Mike Newell’s 1985 film Dance With a Stranger. Ellis was famously the last woman hanged to death in Britain. That film also revealed for the first time on the big screen the immense talent of Miranda Richardson. It was Everett’s third film, after Another Countryand Real Life. He has had a patchy career since, but when his talent and personality blaze he sets the screen on fire. When he thought his career was in terminal decline he was offered a small part in a RomCom, just two brief scenes, but the Director, P. J. Hogan expanded the role of George Downs, the gay friend of Julia Roberts in the 1994 hit My Best Friend’s Wedding, andEverett let his wit and charm flow. Most of his lines were his own. A year later he appeared (uncredited) as Kit Marlow in Shakespeare in Love, and on to his roles as Lord Arthur Goring inWilde’s An Ideal Husband and Algyin The Importance of Being Ernest. Everett and Wilde were made for each other, and Everett has hardly been out of work since, recently on stage as Wilde himself in David Hare’s play The `Judas Kiss, previously in Shrekon the big screen, and as the Marquis de Feron in six episodes of the BBC’s Musketeersin 2016. He will soon be seen as the inquisitor Bernard de Gul in the TV version of The Name of The Rose(the part played by F. Murray Abraham in the 1986 film).
So what of the film itself? Everett wrote, directed and of course stars in The Happy Prince. The title comes from one of Wilde’s children’s stories (though like all his stories it has a deep political and moral subtext). Everett uses it as a framing device as Wilde starts to tell the tale to a young French pimp at the beginning of the movie, ending it close to the end of the movie and Wilde’s own life. As a dramatic device (the boy and his elder brother are ficticious) it has some charm, and may alert some viewers to the stories and their layers, but the true pathos comes from the real suffering that Wilde bore in prison, seen in flashbacks. This is especially true when he was being transferred by train from Wandsworth to Reading jails, when he spend thirty minutes on the platform of Clapham Junction Station, where he was recognized, and then firstly laughed and jeered at, then spat on. “For a year after that was done to me,’ Wilde wrote in De Profundis, ‘I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time.” (Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann, page 465.) He also suffered insults and snubs after his release. When in Dieppe with his loyal friends Reggie Turner and Robert Ross they came across Walter Sickert, Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Condor and Jacques-Emile Blanche, former friends – and some of whom had good reason to be grateful to Wilde when he was in his pomp – but all of whom plainly ‘cut’ him. That incident is not in the movie, and I do not know if the incident of Wilde, Turner and Ross being chased by English Yahoos visiting Dieppe in the film is historical.
Emily Watson plays Constance, Wilde’s wife, Colin Firth and Edwin Thomas play his true friends Reggie Williams and Robert Ross, Tom Wilkinson plays the priest who turns up to give Wilde Last Absolution, and Anna Chancellor appears briefly as an English woman who recognized Wilde in Paris and offers him her support – an offer curtly curtailed by her husband. The Irish actor Colin Morgan plays Bosie. You may have seen him as Merlin in the long running eponymous TV series, or as the cop Tom Anderson in The Fall. Watching him here you understand a little more about why Oscar fell in love with him, and why doing so was so calamitous for him.
But this is Everett’s film. His performance is bravura yet nuanced, tender yet belligerent, charming, ugly and utterly convincing. Who could speak Wilde’s lines better than Everett? There is no vanity here; Everett exposes Wilde’s physical decay and eventual emotional decrepitude ruthlessly. But he does so out of love. We do not pretend that those we truly love are better than they are.
He has chosen his cast and crew well, capitalizing on his long career in TV and film to remember and recruit talent. He must have known Brian Morris, the veteran Production Designer, since they both worked on Another Country. Morris also worked on The Commitments, The Hunger and Damage. Everett will have got to know his cameraman, John Conroy, on the set of The Name of The Rose. Conroy’s TV work includes episodes filmed in the dark alley ways of Penny Dreadfuland on the beaches of Broadchurch, both echoed here. The music is by Gabriel Yared (The English Patient, Cold Mountain, The Lives of Others andCity of Angels) a man who knows how to handle deep emotional scenes without sentimentality or manipulation. His editor was Nicolas Gaster, whose work has included Moon(an editing master class), Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Coriolanus. So this first time director assembled a great crew, and he surely knew how to work with his fellow actors.
I was informed, entertained and moved by this film. What more do we want?
