Review: Duncan Roy’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

When I heard that this year’s Inside Out film festival in Toronto would be screening a modern adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I really jumped on the chance to attend, since I’m right in the middle of reading the novel. The film has been met with a good amount of controversy and criticism (locally, even) in the cities in which it has screened already, and for good reasons. Duncan Roy, the filmmaker and director of the new Gray film, proudly proclaimed before the sold out audience of the Isabel Bader theater that from the outset of creating the film he intended to “put back the gay in Dorian Gray.”

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There’s no question that there are strong homosexual undertones throughout the novel, and certainly there are moments where it’s more obvious than others, but Roy went out of his way to ensure that the first and foremost it was a gay film, and secondary to that a film about youth, vanity, and the pursuit of fame, which the novel tends to lean towards. Roy claims that the novel went through several rounds of censorship after Wilde wrote the original version almost a hundred years ago, since it was met with disgust and disapproval from the society of its time.

The film is heavily artistic, making use of bold typography for some of Wilde’s most famous quotes from the novel, and overexposed, wildly colourful shots to depict Gray’s transformation following the fateful events that cause him to see himself for who he truly is. The typography was a little too over the top, spelling out themes from the story that didn’t necessarily need to be spelled out in such blatancy. Roy even admitted that he dumbed the film down to a certain degree for some of the, erm… ‘less astute’ audiences that he anticipated screening the film for, and that he often heard criticism from non-American audiences that the film all too often was too explicit in its depictions of themes and concepts. There are many examples of this throughout the film, one such being the scene where Dorian encounters an AIDS-stricken Basil Hallward, and big, bold text, ‘AIDS’ is flashed on the screen, almost too quick to be seen.

I thoroughly enjoyed Christian Camargo (known for his chilling performance as Rudy in Showtime’s Dexter) in his role as Lord Henry Wotton, both the way that the actor carried himself, and how he delivered the often comical and stinging lines throughout the novel and film. Since Wilde often used Wotton as a means of projecting his own ideas, this also made him the most interesting and complex character. He brought out a lot of laughs from the crowd, and deservedly so, often exclusively because of the inflection he put into so many of his lines. Noah Segan’s Basil Hallward convincingly portrayed his infatuation with Dorian Gray, albeit in a much more over the top way than in the novel, but convincingly nonetheless.

The main problem I had with the cast was the Gray himself, David Gallagher. This film was clearly Gallagher’s attempt to escape the 7th Heaven typecast he has been unfortunately stuck with, and maybe that’s what made the character seem so unbelievable, but I really don’t think he was a good fit for the part. The main character is no doubt always the most difficult to express the same amount of depth (or in this case even, lack of depth) with novel-to-film translations, but I felt as though they could have cast an actor that was more flighty, more vain, a tad more feminine, and dare I say, more attractive than Gallagher. Wilde goes to great lengths at Dorian Gray’s introduction to express how handsome, how strikingly beautiful Gray is, and I think that was a crucial part of the story in helping to explain the vanity behind Gray, and why so many people in the story do the things they do simply because they’re virtually hypnotized by his appearance and charm.

In fact, the same can be said for Dorian’s early love interest, Sibyl Vane. Dorian continually focused on the beauty of Sibyl Vane to Basil and Henry prior to their meeting her, as well as her acting abilities. Not that the actress playing the role wasn’t attractive, but I don’t think either of these qualities of the character were expressed with the same degree that Wilde went to in the novel, and I think these were critical opportunities missed.

Overall, the film was a fairly good modern representation of the ideas and themes presented in the novel (from what I’ve read, thus far, anyway) and it was enjoyable to see such a classic be reinterpreted, notwithstanding the often overly-hedonistic homosexual spin put on it. But hey, it probably wouldn’t have been a great candidate to open the Inside Out film fest if it wasn’t portrayed this way, would it? I’ll be sure to append any thoughts to the review should I come across anything in finishing off the novel that might change my opinion.