LOOKING FOR a serious engagement with Oscar Wilde's fruitily transgressive novel The Picture of Dorian Gray?Well, there's little to interest you here. Move along, aesthetes.
Having earlier preserved Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnestand An Ideal Husbandin the blandest cinematic aspic, Oliver Parker now abandons caution to render Dorian Gray as a full-on Thameside Gothic. Wilde would have abhorred every vulgar, blood- drenched, tart-cackling second, but those tolerant of high-end Hammer should encounter plenty of guilty pleasures.
The film-makers have, to be fair, retained most of the book's structure. Pretty young Ben Barnes, hitherto best known as Prince Caspian in the second Narniafilm, plays the hero as a cross between David Cassidy and American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. Arriving in Victorian London, he is swept into a decadent class-traversing demimonde – more slap-and-tickle with your gin, dearie? – by the sinister Henry Wooton (a surprisingly effective Colin Firth).
Following a personal catastrophe, Dorian embraces booze and multi- partner rumpy-pumpy with ever- greater enthusiasm. While he stays fresh of face, the image in his portrait begins to show signs of wear. Dorian places the picture in the attic and continues to party.
Dorian Grayhas no delusions about its own low-mindedness. The closest we get to visual subtext occurs when Parker intercuts one of several sex-and-swilling montages with shots of strawberry jam being spread damply on yielding teacakes. Yet, it is all the more fun for its unpretentiousness.
The only unforgivably cheesy moment occurs when the painting (rendered beautifully in the superior 1945 version) turns out to resemble a zombie from the cut scene of a particularly hopeless video game. As we said, Oscar would have hated it.
