Dorian Gray (Great Britain, 2009)

 

"The only way to get rid of a temptation, is to yield to it."
Lord Henry Wotton (Colin Firth)

Trailer to

Dorian Gray:

Obviously enough based Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, this 2009 feature-film version of the tale is but one in a long line of cinema undertakings that go back as early as 1910, with the Dane Axel Strøm's lost short Dorian Grays Portræt, and that include versions such as the lost Hungarian feature film Az élet királya (1918), with Bela Lugosi as Lord Harry Watton [sic]; Albert Lewin's "classic" B&W version from 1945 (trailer), with the famous painting by the American painter Ivan (Le Lorraine) Albright (above) now hanging at the Art Institute of Chicago; Massimo Dallamano's intriguing Eurotrash version, Il dio chiamato Doria (1970 / trailer — see Maria Rohm), which sets the events in the then contemporary 1970s; the forgotten porn version by the graphic artist Armand Weston (26 Dec 1931 – 26 May 1988), Take Off (1978 / scenes / full NSFW film), German poster directly below, starring one of a wasted life's favorite male pornsters, Wade Nichols,* as the titular hedonist, now named Darrin Blue (the Golden Age production swept the 1979 awards at AFAA); and Wash Westmoreland's totally obscure D2V big-tooled and muscular The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony [2001], featuring the pleasant whopper of Eric Hanson at his prime as that of Dorian.

* Normally when we refer to Wade Nichols (28 Oct 1946 – 28 Jan 1985), a.k.a. Dennis Parker, in a post, we embed his disco song Like an Eagle (see: Uschi Pt X: 1977, Gigi Darlene Pt III & Harry H. Novak Pt VIII), but for a change we'll embed his second disco single, which reached #11 on the charts in South Africa in 1980:

Wade Nichols/Dennis Parker singing

New York by Night:

But this version of The Picture of Dorian Gray here is hardly obscure and is definitely not porn. No, this one is a rather upscale British production, a period piece shot at Ealing Studios and on location in London; it's also the third Oscar Wilde adaptation directed by former actor (e.g., Nightbreed [1990 / trailer]) turned director Oliver Parker, his earlier two Wilde movie adaptations being the comedies An Ideal Husband (1999 / trailer) and The Importance of Being Earnest (2002 / trailer), both of which are more interesting and entertaining than this polished but oddly uninvolving horror movie.

 

"You shouldn't believe every word Harry says. He doesn't."
Basil Hallward (Ben Chaplin)

 

Not that Parker's Dorian Gray is really a terrible film, it is just that for all its upscale production values and nifty period setting, it suffers from an amazingly weak lead, some questionable CGI townscapes and a tacky CGI painting of Dorian Gray, one too many dream sequences, and a general tameness that sorely undermines the interest of the viewer — and that despite the addition a few truly modern-feeling sequences of violence and blood.

The narrative is probably known well enough: upon seeing the portrait painting by his artist friend Basil Hallward (Ben Chaplin of Lost Souls [2000] and Twixt [2011 / trailer]), the attractive Dorian Gray (Ben Barnes), an innocent of captivating attractiveness, glibly states that he would trade his soul to stay young forever. And thus it transpires: he remains ageless and unchanged while his portrait, which he soon hides from the public, shows the true ravages upon his soul and appearance as he, taking the libertine and egocentrically amoral admonishments of Lord Henry Wotton (Colin Firth of Apartment Zero [1988 / trailer] and Kingsman: The Secret Service [2014 / trailer]) as words of wisdom by which to live, spirals into a licentious life of wanton and intentional decadence and evil...

Scriptwriter Toby Finlay does tweak the narrative of the book here there, but for the addition of the dream sequences and Dorian's past as an abused child one would be hard placed to say that some of the changes don't work. Having Dorian get rid of the Hallward's body, and the method he chooses, does work better than how it occurs in the book, for example, and the demise of James Vane (Johnny Harris of Black Death [2010 / trailer] and RocknRolla [2008 / trailer]) is definitely better — as well as more in line with the cinematic tastes of today — than his rather ignoble accidental death in Wilde's novel.

Perhaps the most inspired change, however, is the replacement of the book's rather stock character of Hetty Merton — Wilde, whose opinion of women was rather low, was not exactly gifted with an ability to make them well-rounded characters — with Emily (Rebecca Hall of The Night House [2020 / trailer], The Gift [2015 / trailer] and The Awakening [2011 / trailer]), the suffragette daughter of the now aged Lord Wotton. The change adds an appealing level of irony in that a man who basically molded the subsequent decadent character of the young and impressionable Gray through the witty espousal of self-indulgence and hedonism should experience his unwitting creation coming back to rob him of his greatest treasure, his daughter.

Unluckily, though Rebecca Hall is pleasant enough and not a bad actor, the budding love between her character, Emily, and Dorian, fails to achieve any level of verisimilitude or true believability. The same can be said of Hallward's pre-decay portrait of Dorian, which, though continually referred to as a masterpiece and his best work, is a rather generic and unimpressive portrait that in no way exudes "masterpiece"*. Likewise, the later CGI version of the portrait reflecting Dorian's morally bankrupt soul is, for all the dropping maggots, less terrifying than unconvincing and ridiculous.

* For an example of a portrait that truly exudes masterpiece that was painted around the time in which the narrative of Dorian Gray transpires, take a gander at John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Madame X (1884)... Hell's Bells, even the average Norman Rockwell or Margaret Keane painting has more presence than Hallward's portrait of Dorian does.

Furthermore, the movie in general remains rather uninteresting and uninvolving, and more than one character is miscast. Rachel Hurd-Wood (of Perfume [2006 / trailer] and Soloman Kane [2009 / trailer]), for example, who plays Dorian's first love interest Sibyl Vane, whom he soon drives to suicide, remains as oddly vapid as she is attractive. And as the titular lead Dorian, Ben Barnes (of Killing Bono [2011 / trailer] and By the Gun [2014 / trailer]) is dreadful. When he first arrives in London, he comes across less innocent and babe-in-the-woods than he does slightly intellectually challenged, and throughout the movie he never once manages to successfully convey the allure that supposedly makes him so irresistible to everyone around him. For that matter, he never really comes across as evil, even when he's trying to convey evil — all of which is surprising, when one takes into account how he so successfully conveys allure, "goodness" and unadulterated evil in the watchable Netfux series Shadow and Bone (2021-23 / trailer).

A twinky Ben Barnes in

the British boy group Hyrise singing

Leading Me On:

All in all, Dorian Gray is watchable but unmemorable. The impressionable might find it mildly scary in places, and perhaps even a bit "decadent", but there are really so many better horror movies out there that it seems a shame to bother with one as lackluster as this. The witticisms are the best thing about the movie, but though witty dialogue is indeed a specialty and integral part of Oscar Wilde's work, nice dialogue without convincing fear or terror does not translate into a good scary movie.