D

Less an adaptation than a bastardization, Oliver Parker’s frantic reworking of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 masterpiece is a misfire of the first order. “The Importance of Being Earnest” is quite simply the wittiest play in the English language, a piece so flawlessly fashioned and deliciously phrased as to provide ample pleasure even in a mediocre stage production; it’s one of those rare works of art that, if only presented honestly, is virtually indestructible. Though it boasts a promising cast, however, Parker’s treatment is an almost unmitigated disaster.

This is rather a shock, since Parker gave us a generally estimable film version of Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” in 1999: he made alterations to the script, to be sure, but that play doesn’t approach the perfection of “Earnest” in the first instance, and in any event the changes weren’t destructive. With “Earnest,” however, his choices are almost always wrong; indeed, he seems perversely to have gone out of his way to destroy the piece’s basic strengths and replace them with a kind of loutish vulgarity that’s completely foreign to the original. To anyone who loves this play, he result will be painful to watch.

Parker’s initial error was to treat Wilde’s brilliant deconstruction of nineteenth-century British class and cultural mores (played out in the form of the “romances” of two duplicitous men with the women they seek to marry) in a generally naturalistic way. The very essence of “Earnest” is its exquisite artificiality, its foppish dismissal of the slightest hint of realism and utter embrace of mannerism. As one of its characters retorts when something’s he’s said is criticized for not having any meaning, it’s style, not the truthfulness, that matters. Parker has misunderstood this essential fact and tried idiotically to make his picture accessible to modern audiences by dampening the wit in favor of ham-fisted farce and “opening up” the action (presumably to make the film seem less talky and wearisomely “cultivated”) by introducing such extraneous elements as chases, romantic hallucinations, and even a crassly foolish musical number. Instead of an elegant play of words, we’re given something like “A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Manor.” But while vaudeville slapstick was quite appropriately applied to Plautus, Wilde is entirely another matter. In the process the delicate brilliance of the original is crushed and in its place we get merely a sloppy, amateurish burlesque. (A brutally cute and obtrusive music score by Charlie Mole only adds to the sense of crudity.)

There are some glimpses of what might have been in the pithy gem-likes lines of Wilde that continue to shine even in a context like this one (when you can hear them amidst the hubbub), and in the work of the talented, but mostly misused, cast. Rupert Everett, as the wonderfully wicked Algernon, and Colin Firth, as the staider, parentless Jack Worthing, could conceivably succeed in these roles, but under the stress of Parker’s sledgehammer direction and a battery of unflattering close-ups they appear to be working far too strenuously; these characters need to appear snootily detached and virtually plastic, but here they sweat, smirk and groan all too obviously. The women of the romantic quartet are better. Frances O’Connor makes a suitably chilly Gwendolyn, and Reese Witherspoon an amusingly ditzy Cecily. Best of all is Judi Dench, who recites her speeches magisterially and manages to retain the dignity of the redoubtable Lady Bracknell even when Parker requires her to run about in the wild toward the close–something we know inherently that this overweeningly imperious figure would never do. Edward Fox also contributes a few good moments as Algy’s impossibly proper butler. Tom Wilkinson could probably have made a wonderful Dr. Chasuble, but Parker forces him to employ so many tics and sniffles that his performance is buried in them. And Anna Massey slips too easily into pathos as the reverend’s intended, Miss Prism. Astonishingly, Parker chooses to play her final “revelation” scene–one of the most archly outrageous recognition scenes in theatrical history, perhaps rivaled only by the equivalent episode in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro”–almost seriously. Even at this most wonderfully artificial point, Parker blunders disastrously into realism.

Happily, there are alternatives. Anthony Asquith’s 1952 filmization might not be precisely calibrated, but in Edith Evans it has a marvelous Lady Bracknell, and it’s at least true to the play’s nature. Even better is the 1981 television version by Michael Linday-Hogg (based on Michael Attenborough’s London stage production), with Wendy Hiller and Jeremy Clyde memorable as Lady Bracknell and Algernon; its candy-cane colored ambience and mannered style capture the piece’s tone of elegant absurdity almost perfectly. (There are probably other good versions out there too, but I haven’t encountered them.) Unfortunately, those who come to know Wilde’s masterpiece only through this misbegotten venture will have to be forgiven if they scratch their heads and wonder why “Earnest” has been held in such high regard by so many connoisseurs for more than a century. An amateur local production will be a better introduction to Wilde’s wonderful wit than this.