Wilde

The film catches Oscar Wilde at the top: his plays running in London, his lines quoted everywhere, married with two sons. Then he meets Lord Alfred Douglas. Bosie is spoiled, vicious and determined to settle accounts with his father through Wilde. Wilde chooses him knowingly and pays for it. Stephen Fry is almost too apt a piece of casting, for the physical resemblance and for the exhaustion he carries behind the wit. Jude Law's Bosie makes no attempt to be likeable, and that is where the film is honest: this relationship is not offered as a love story. The screenplay works from Richard Ellmann's biography of Wilde. Tom Wilkinson, Michael Sheen, Jennifer Ehle and Vanessa Redgrave fill the cast, and it premiered at Venice in 1997. Its flaw is that the trials and the prison years pass quickly, and Wilde's wife Constance is given very little room. Who it is for: viewers who like literary biography. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a film centred on Wilde's work.