The Happy Prince (2018)

Directed by: Rupert Everett | 105 minutes | drama, history | Actors: Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Emily Watson, Colin Morgan, Edwin Thomas, Tom Wilkinson, Anna Chancellor, Julian Wadham, Béatrice Dalle, Antonio Spagnuolo, André Penvern, Franca Abategiovanni, Thierry de Coster, Joshua McGuire, Kit Lloyd, Jacky Druaux

Rupert Everett, wasn’t he in ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ (1997)? And didn’t he ever have a child with Madonna in ‘The Next Best Thing’ (2000)? Around the turn of the century there seemed to be a nice career ahead for the sympathetic Brit, although he often played ‘the gay best friend’ or variants thereof. Barely a decade later, Everett was suddenly eerily quiet. He occasionally appeared in a bit part – for example, he gave Prince Charming a voice in the ‘Shrek’ films – and made his mark with a revealing autobiography, but otherwise his career as an actor seemed a bit off. to sit in the doldrums. That Everett certainly did not sit still at that time, we now know that he has launched his dream project ‘The Happy Prince’ (2018). Everett wrote the screenplay for the film in 2007 about the last years in the life of writer and poet Oscar Wilde, a man with whom Everett has been fascinated since his childhood. “My mother used to read to me from ‘The Happy Prince’ and even though I didn’t quite understand the mysterious and poetic lyrics – neither did my mother for that matter – I knew it was interesting and deep. It grabbed me and fascinated me immensely.”

But it turned out to be an impossible task to film his script. Producer Scott Rudin was enthusiastic about the story, but did not see the right person in Everett to play the lead role (read: Rudin didn’t think Everett was a good actor). He would have preferred someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman to step into Wilde’s shoes, but Everett put a stop to that. That role was for him and no one else. He then peddled from one director to another for three years, but each time he was blunt. Then there’s no choice but to take matters into your own hands, Everett thought. He only managed to rake in financiers by playing the role of Wilde on stage: in this way he silenced anyone who did not consider him good enough as an actor. It took him some years, but now his name as a director, writer and protagonist is on the role of ‘The Happy Prince’. So you can rightly speak of a ‘labour of love’, although that does not mean that Everett neglects to show the less charming sides of the complex Wilde in his film.

‘The Happy Prince’ follows the famous writer and poet in the very last years of his life. Even though he’s only in his mid-forties, his heyday is now behind him and he hasn’t written a book in a while. The two years he spent in prison broke him. He was brought to trial by the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his great love Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas (Colin Morgan) and convicted of ‘gross indecency’. Now that he is free again, he immediately flees to France, where he tries to pick up his life again under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. He is taken in by his loyal friends Robert Ross (Edwin Thomas) and Reggie Taylor (Colin Firth). His wife Constance (Emily Watson) still loves him, but wants to keep their two sons away from the scandals surrounding her husband and asks for a divorce. The boys will never see Oscar again. In Paris he spends the remaining time hanging out in bars, nightly wanderings and hooking up with young male prostitutes. His health is deteriorating visibly and when he lies on his deathbed, he has the final confrontation with his past.

Someone who knows that his end is near often sees his whole life flash before him. At least that’s what they say. In ‘The Happy Prince’ Wilde doesn’t see his whole life so much as the last few years. Everett wants his viewer to experience that same feeling and treats us to a series of memories, not necessarily in chronological order, woven together in a coherent way. A star that once shone as bright as Wilde’s can fall deep. The beauty of that decay fascinates Everett and that is what he wants to convey to his audience. He plays Wilde as the esthetician, hedonist and romantic that he was, a snob who (still) felt that the world revolved around him. The actor puts his whole heart and soul into the role and wraps the viewer around his finger without any effort. As a debuting director, he also appears to have a fine sense of aesthetics and was able to attract a number of talented colleagues (Firth, Watson, Tom Wilkinson) for supporting roles.

What especially sticks with ‘The Happy Prince’ is the tragedy surrounding Wilde, who was only officially rehabilitated in 2015 (!). Everett, himself openly gay, aims with his directorial debut to expose the hypocritical morality that existed then and which, 120 years later, has still not completely disappeared, certainly not in countries outside the Western world. He does this with a very intimate film adaptation in which he draws the viewer into the poetic jumble of memories that pass by Wilde on his deathbed. ‘The Happy Prince’ is close to his heart and he has done everything he can to make his audience think the same.