Dorian Gray (Oliver Parker, 2009)

Oscar Wilde's best-known foray into the novel has been filmed umpteen times, its central theme of the corrupting influence of hedonism on the soul continuing to exert a powerful pull which transcends the original setting of genteel Victorian high society. But it's important to understand that it's the necessarily unspoken subtext - The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name - that gives the story its dramatic rationale. A literal reading will fall flat, and more so with each passing generation, for whom a life of irresponsible sex and opium use will not readily equate to an irredeemable tainting of the spirit, and unfortunately this is the trap that Parker's film falls unwittingly into.
The teen-friendly casting of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian's admirably cheek-boned but tonally rangeless Ben Barnes in the lead role does not help matters, but neither does Colin Firth's decision to swallow even more of his lips and vowels as Gray's vicarious mentor-in-cynicism and aphorisms, Wilde's alter ego Henry Wotton, or the superfluous addition to the story of Wotton's daughter as a potential beacon of hope. Also, the normally reliable Roger Pratt's cinematography lurches from high art to TV soap, though the jarring insertion of unnecessary flashbacks hardly aids him in establishing a stylistic continuity.
So, it ends up suffering in comparison not only with another recent adaptation of a great novel about a period sociopath, to wit Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, but also with Albert Lewin's 1945 rendering, which may seem stiflingly mannered now but did have the virtue of letting our imagination do the work instead of the stock footage decadence on show here.

5/10