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Film

Review: Dorian Gray

Wilde gets kinky-horror downgrade

September 10, 2009 09:56
Rebecca Hall shines, but Ben Barnes brings an inappropriately lolloping quality to Dorian Gray the movie

ByJonathan Foreman, Jonathan Foreman

3 min read

When Duncan, the doomed King of Scotland in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, despairs that “there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”, he is citing ancient wisdom. Yet perhaps because the evil characters in fairy tales are ugly and the good ones all handsome or beautiful, most of us tend to grow up believing that external beauty is a reflection of internal loveliness. This is a forgivable error, not least because the very good looking do have an easier row to hoe and can often afford to be nicer and more generous human beings.

Moreover, as people hit middle age, their faces really can reflect the person within, if only because habitual expressions leave a permanent mark in laugh lines or a turned-down mouth.

Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is about a spectacularly beautiful young man who embarks on a long career of corruption and viciousness, but whose face never reveals any trace of his evil ways. Nor does he age, thanks to a satanic bargain whereby all the ugliness that his face should show appears instead on a portrait he keeps locked away in an attack.

Gray is classic gothic horror fiction in the tradition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the works of Edgar Allen Poe, though it is also interesting for its homosexual subtexts, and a rather confused moral message. This latest film adaptation of the novel tries to stress the horror elements of Wilde’s tale, exploiting the full modern armoury of computer-generated effects. Not only does the hidden portrait start to show a red-eyed and aging face, maggots crawl out of the canvas and eventually it starts to make loud, scary growling noises.