WILDE

• Starring Stephen Fry, Jude Law, Vanessa Redgrave and Jennifer Ehle
• Directed by Brian Gilbert
• Rated R, with brief flashes of nudity and much emotional violence 116 minutes
• Our rating: 5

The Associated Press

(June 5, 1998) -- Wilde may be named for the legendary wit and aesthete at its center, but chances are the character you're unlikely to forget is Oscar Wilde's lover-turned-nemesis, Bosie, played by an electrifying Jude Law.

That impression in no way discredits leading man Stephen Fry, who provides a fleshy and sympathetic center to a movie redolent of the stiff, old-fashioned film biographies that the real Wilde would no doubt have thought a bore.

But in his largest screen role to date, Law -- a Tony nominee several years ago for the play Indiscretions -- is so frighteningly charismatic that he gives a mediocre movie its real charge.

While other treatments of the same material have been unable to make sense of an ever-notorious, not to mention ruinous, attraction, Wilde makes this celebrated, ultimately sad partnership utterly clear: Bosie's feelings for Oscar constituted a complicated elixir as poisoned as it was passionate. Or, as Wilde might have put it, what one loves, one destroys.

Wilde's aphorisms and epigrams are scattered liberally throughout the movie, as are scenes from some of the best-known comedies in the English language.

But at the core of the film is Oscar's passion for the younger, titled Lord Alfred Douglas, a.k.a. Bosie, the Oxford-educated poet who initiated the seemingly happily married Oscar into love and lust only to prompt his smitten mentor's collapse.

Oscar, for his part, emerges as a not-unwitting accomplice in his own downfall. Why pursue the case for libel against Bosie's venal father, the Marquess of Queensberry (a stern Tom Wilkinson, seen with rather fewer clothes on in The Full Monty), knowing that the older man's charges of sodomy were, of course, true?

"Whatever our natures are, we must fulfill them," Oscar muses at the end, a broken man found guilty by the British crown of "gross indecency" and sentenced to two years' hard labor in Reading Jail.

In his heavy-lidded, humane way, this Wilde is a fighter, and he's not going to allow a malcontent like the Marquess to go unchallenged.

Wilde's life is a rich, ripe story that reveals a lot about England a century ago.

Director Brian Gilbert and screenwriter Julian Mitchell take a straightforward, not particularly subtle approach to their depiction. And the film echoes their earlier trawl through the wayward domestic life of T.S. Eliot in the biographical movie Tom and Viv.

How do we learn of Wilde's greatness? Because characters keep announcing it, beginning with Vanessa Redgrave in a bizarrely accented performance as Oscar's mother, Lady Speranza.

Later, once public opinion against Oscar turns, Gilbert stages some tacky scenes of disgust, as the populace spits and swears at a man whom only years before they had revered.

If too much of the film has the feel of a Wilde primer for eager students, everything about the Oscar-Bosie pairing seems properly complex.

Eyes flashing, the alluring Law suggests a thing of beauty brought low by self-hatred, lashing out at others when his true culprit is himself.

Throughout, the viewer sees Bosie parading his seductive potential in front of Oscar and then turning on him when most needed. "You don't interest me," snaps Bosie. "Not when you're ill."

In Fry's shrewd and moving performance, Oscar, in turn, is far too clever not to understand his demonically possessed disciple, even as he recognizes -- on some level -- that Bosie's temper will bring down Oscar.

You always feel the mix of attraction and revulsion that drives Oscar, even though he's oblivious to his one true love, Robbie Ross (Michael Sheen), who could have been his if Oscar had ever wanted him.

The sweet-faced Sheen is the standout of a fine supporting cast, which includes Jennifer Ehle as the doomed Constance, Wilde's wife and herself an unwitting victim, and Zoe Wanamaker and Judy Parfitt as two of the shrewder women in Oscar's increasingly male-dominated orbit.

But Wilde belongs to its male co-stars. While Fry reinvents for keeps a legendary legend with a wounded heart, Law quite simply tears up the screen, leaving us -- and Oscar -- bleeding.