London,

Dorian Gray

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Oliver Parker. Cast: Rebecca Hall, Ben Chaplin, Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, Emilia Fox

 

Description: Dorian Gray arrives in London, unaware of the horrors that lurk beneath the facade of 19th-century society. Lord Henry Wotton takes Dorian under his wing, setting the youngster on the path to damnation. Every time the lad falls from grace and succumbs to temptation, a painting of his beautiful visage decays. Thus Dorian secrets the portrait away in the attic where no one can glimpse how ugly he has become inside.

Country: UK. 2009. 112mins

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Dorian Gray: a movie for teenagers

The face fits: Ben Barnes as Dorian Gray

Ben Barnes boasts zeitgeisty good looks. Like Twilight’s Robert Pattinson, he’s as pallid as he is pretty, what you might call perversely effete.

Once upon a time, he might have been dubbed a pansy. In the Noughties, such top-drawer androgyny has become universally attractive — a fact which Oliver Parker’s melodrama-cum-horror show shrewdly exploits.

The film is based on Oscar Wilde’s short novel, which tells the story of a beautiful, innocent boy corrupted by praise and prose. Dorian Gray (Barnes) arrives in London, gets his portrait painted by a “feminine” artist called Basil (Ben Chaplin) and, encouraged by the cynical Lord Henry Wootton (Colin Firth), sells his soul in order to remain physically perfect.

First-time scriptwriter Toby Finlay has added a backstory to explain Dorian and his Faustian pact — he was cruelly beaten by his potty grandfather. It’s also made abundantly clear that men, as well as women, find Dorian attractive and that Dorian is prepared to swing both ways. He’s also into class-A drugs, S&M and body piercing, though he is, of course, a prisoner of his own vices and nothing gives him satisfaction. Much of the new material cancels itself out.

Dorian’s first love, Sybil (Rachel Hurd-Wood), has become far less complex (in the book, she, like Basil, is obsessed with the relationship between art and life) and Dorian’s sudden rejection of her feels like an out-take from Men Behaving Badly. Chaplin and Firth are stodgy in all the wrong ways.

As for the attempts to frighten us... from the minute a fat maggot struggles to emerge from the painted Dorian’s eyeball the nightmare becomes laughable. When we finally saw the attic-bound portrait, the audience I was with guffawed as one. O the horror! The Hammer horror!

But teenagers will love this film. They will love it because there are lots of close-ups of Barnes being done unto or doing unto others. As a vehicle for a rising and undeniably talented star, it hits the spot.

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