Berlin Film Festival 2018: The Happy Prince review - Wilde at heart

Being earnest: Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde in The Happy Prince
Nick Roddick19 February 2018

The Happy Prince is evidently a passion project for Rupert Everett, who writes, directs and stars.

Made with modest means pieced together from Belgium, the UK, Germany, France and Italy, The Happy Prince gets every euro up on the screen. More importantly, it gets its creator’s passion up there too.
This is not the Oscar Wilde of other biopics, basking in the fame of the London stage, a vision in velvet dispensing witticisms like papal benedictions.

This is a Wilde broken by Reading gaol, constantly begging for money but unable to hold onto it. “Like dear St Francis of Assisi,” he complains, “I am wedded to poverty. But in my case the marriage is not a happy one.”

Raddled, rouged and raging against the world (but often tender, too), Everett’s Wilde is an extraordinary achievement — pitiful but unashamed, it is surely the best thing he has done as an actor. As a director, he delivers the vision
(and the passion). But it is as a writer he most impresses, constructing a mosaic that weaves Wilde’s decline from exhilaration at being free to decline and death in a seedy hotel room.

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Everett is always front and centre, touching (as he reads the titular tale to his young sons), witty and occasionally repellent. It is a brave performance, with nowhere to hide, especially in the harrowing death scene.

Possibly Wilde’s most famous line was not from the plays that made his name but from The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “Each man kills the thing he loves.”

Wilde loved many, shamelessly using them to fulfil his needs, but most of all loved himself and The Happy Prince charts the long, slow process of destruction in a way that is both moving and revealing.

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