If you fancy a night in watching a DVD, then take a look at the selection available at Island Libraries. At just £1.50 per night, they’re a great bargain. Ed
The adaptation of Oscar Wildes’ most recognised work ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’, could easily have kept so accurately to the book that it would have become as difficult to tune to what is at times a difficult level of writing to accept.
Director Oliver Parker and writer Toby Finlay therefore have highlighted the initial structure of the story, the highlights of Dorian’s brightly burning existence, or low-lights depending on your own perspective of the infamous character of Dorian Gray.
Good performance from Ben Barnes
However, a film that transcends the stereotypical approach of an English class setting and also causes some serious levels of accessible acting, to an audience on a broader scope, is the strength of a well-filmed and well-acted work.
Although the character of Dorian Gray is well performed by Ben Barnes, the film combines a subtle display of effects and it is this that manages to fulfil an exciting adaptation of an original and fascinating purpose of a corruption of youth that Oscar Wilde originally wrote of.
Tense and exciting film
What is achieved is a genuinely tense and exciting film that is a complete enough body of work that is not as dark as it could have been, because the warnings of the corruption of youth have to be told to an audience of youthful integrity.
This particular film does expound on the virtues of the light and darks ominous quality as both being necessary, as well as the journey of the soul, its’ ability to become torn and scarred, although the surface seems untainted by time and ageing.
Ascension of a person’s soul is the unbearable lightness of being and for some the descent into darkness is their own destiny. ‘Dorian Gray’ is a study of both by a character caught in limbo, a plane of existence so absent of purpose and of meaning unless it inspires, as it did Oscar Wilde’s writing.
