![]() ![]() In an early scene, Wilde lounges in a grubby Parisian bed, staring with post-coital appreciation at the naked teenage prostitute standing by the window. But what he brings to the table-as a director, writer, and actor-is his intuitive "take" on Oscar Wilde and the performance alone makes this riveting and revelatory viewing. ![]() This is Everett's first film as a director, and there are times when it shows. (Wilde was posthumously pardoned-along with 50,000 other men-in 2017.) "The Happy Prince," written, directed, and starring Rupert Everett, tells of Wilde's final 3 years, his isolation, his health issues, his increasing despondence. Upon his release in 1897, his health ruined, he went into exile in France and died three years later, nearly friendless and destitute. After his highly publicized trial in 1895, Wilde was convicted of "gross indecency" and sentenced to two years' hard labor. In 1885, Oscar Wilde wrote in a letter to his friend James Whistler, "Be warned in time, James and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood." Wilde could not have known how tragically true those words would be a mere decade later. ![]()
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