The Happy Prince made me weep. Well done Rupert.

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 18^thMay 1897 until his death on the 30^thNovember 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? 

Pratchett for Girls. And boys. And adults.

For decades I have been urging teenage boys to read the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s Disc World novels.   Especially 13 year olds.    These books are funny, and wise.    Funny enough to engage boys in novel length reading, as long as they share Pratchett’s  sense of humour,  apparently light-weight,  gently spoofing fantasy fiction, but  also rather wise as each book has a humane sub-text, smuggling in attitudes that are anti-misogyny, anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, in fact anti anything that smacks of small-minded meanness, prejudice or hate.    

A cast of Wizards, Witches, Trolls, Dwarves, Werewolves, Vampires, Humans and Igors provide plenty of variety and laughter.  Igors, by the way, are Frankensteinian creatures, cobbled together from spare body parts,  who are very skilled in repairing others human’s bodies.    An almost omnipresence is that of Death, usually with his pale horse, Bincky.   Some of the books focus on The Watch, Ankmorporth’s police force,  a force consisting of many different life forms and led by the (eventually) wonderful Commander Sam Vimes.     Other books are about the Wizard’s Unseen University – where a huge library of magic books is overseen by a Librarian who was at some point transformed into an Orangutan when the magic leaking from the books reached critical point.     Some plots involve Rock Music and Opera, racial stereotyping and exploitation,  feminism (including the ordination of women) football, science, the postal service, the banks, Church,  steam trains, the Movies and many other foci.   

And then there are the Witches.     Teenage boys may not be so interested in  the Witches, but girls might well find them engaging.     Pratchett’s publishers list some books for ‘younger’ readers, YAs.   I had never read any of them  until my attention was caught by some later books concerning Tiffany Aching,  a young witch.  I have now read three of them,  Wintersmith (2006), I shall Wear Midnight(2010) and The Shepherd’s Crown(2015) and I recommend them to any girls aged 12 or over.  And  women of any age.   And men. And boys.    

Why? Because they are just as well written, just as funny and just as wise as the rest.   And they address different issues.  Although Tiffany is young, just rising 13 when we first meet her, she has to face issues of domestic violence,  teenage pregnancy (not hers!), emerging sexuality and death, and the consistent YA themes of power and responsibility.     They also bring us Tiffany’s informal guards, the Mac Nac Feegle tribe of diminutive warriors,  otherwise called the  Wee Free Men.

It is good to find books that young people and their parents – or grandparents – can enjoy and talk about together, especially when they touch issues that might be hard to talk about without the focus of a book.   I rank Terry Pratchett’s books alongside the very different offerings of Philip Pullman, Patrick Ness and Malorie Blackman.   I rejoice that Ness’s trilogy ‘Chaos Walking’is finally being filmed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identityand Edge of Tomorrow)  starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, but will not be released until the spring of 2019.  But you do not have to wit until then to enjoy the discworld.   You will know within a few pages if his style tickles you.   I may take a little longer to see if his satires amuse you, his concerns move you, and your heart warms to his gentle but deep passions.