guybabineau.com

home / about / channel surfing in the sea of happiness / contact

The Importance of Being Earnest
Starring Rupert Everett, Reese Witherspoon, Colin Firth, 
Frances O’Connor and Judi Dench
by Guy Babineau

No one goes to see The Importance of Being Earnest for its 
silly plot; feckless society bachelors Jack and Algernon 
woo self-absorbed beauties Gwendolyn and Cecily despite 
the disapproving glare of pompous, gold-digging Lady 
Bracknell, while simultaneously trying to extricate 
themselves from an absurd dilemma of mistaken identity. 
People go for  Oscar Wilde’s epigrammatic repartee. The 
seamless 1895 farce has survived a million bum-hurting, 
cough-inducing community theatre productions and a stuffy 
1952 film version with its brilliant wit intact. Can it survive 
a modern movie audience? 

It’s a British comedy so naturally an A-list American hottie 
stars in a romantic lead. Reese Witherspoon’s fresh 
performance as the spoiled airhead Cecily is a delight. For 
no particular reason, though, her scenes lapse into pre-
Raphaelite dream sequences meant to symbolize Cecily’s 
romantic delusions. “Telegraphing” is a term in the theatre 
which means hitting the audience on the head with a 
hammer to make sure that they get the point. Director 
Oliver Parks, who directed 1999’s An Ideal Husband, 
telegraphs like crazy.

Judi Dench’s Lady Bracknell brilliantly surpasses the 
cobwebbed film performance by Edith Evans, who 
practically branded the role. Bracknell tends to be played as 
a matronly buffoon but Dench gives us a deliciously 
commanding, calculating and intimidating bitch. Frances 
O’Connor replaces some of Gwendolyn’s social snobbery 
with vixenish sensuality, and consequently shines. Rupert 
Everett was born to play the egotistical, dandyish Algernon. 
But now, in his 40s, he’s a good ten years too old. The ever 
reliable Colin Firth is also a decade beyond acceptability as 
Jack, and looks like a Dad not a suitor. Everett and Firth 
have more chemistry together than they do with 
Witherspoon and O’Connor. Why didn’t they just cut to the 
chase and woo each other? The only romantic setup with 
unquestionable chemistry is between troupers Anna Massey 
as Miss Prism and Tom Wilkinson as Dr. Chasuble.

The director seems to be the one person involved who 
doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. It doesn’t stop with 
Cecily’s surrealism. Parks also experiments with slapstick 
and naturalism, which you can sense the actors straining 
against. Naturalism is bad enough in real life. Why ruin 
perfectly good art with it?

Wilde’s artifice parodies the trite comedies and nouveau 
riche values of late Victorian society. His razor-sharp, 
subtly subversive observations still ring true today. But this 
movie is a hairsbreadth away from being the very thing 
Wilde criticized. The middle class will adore it.

Originally published in The Georgia Straight

© Guy Babineau 2003-2004

< home