The Picture of Dorian Gray

At the Outfest screening in July 2007, the director told us "If you haven't read the book, this picture will make no sense. For those of you who have read the book, I sincerely apologize." He also said "This is a difficult film." We thought he meant difficult to make, but after seeing it we realize he meant difficult to watch. He said his intent was to remake "The Picture of Dorian Gray" with the gay undertone highlighted. For whatever reason, he chose to throw out conventional film narrative style and make an experimental film. The result is dream-like, confusing, and disjoint. It's a hard film to make sense of, even if one knows the story well. If you aren't already familiar with the story, you'll have no idea what is going on.

The film does succeed in making explicit the gay subtext of the story and previous adaptations, but don't expect a conventional film.

I saw this on opening night at the Miami Gay Film Fest and I, along with about 98% of the audience, hated it. Everyone left hissing and didn't bother to stay for the Q&A with director Duncan Roy, who was just as pretentious on stage as his film was on screen. The film itself is clumsy, underwritten, and lazy, supposedly taking place in the 80s and 90s but clearly the budget was too small to hide the fact the backdrop is obviously 2005 New York. The acting was bad and the placing of dialogue as text in huge letters on the screen is about as film-school- amateur-ostentatious as you can get. Also the film was obviously trying to say something about the AIDS crisis among gay men but failed to register any conclusive facts or interesting ideas. As it is, this Picture of Dorian Gray is a sluggish piece if crap that will have a hard time getting theatrical release. Most likely, the film will go directly to HERE or LOGO or DVD where it will fade into bad movie obscurity.

Last night I saw The Picture of Dorian Gray with five friends at the Odeon Leicester Square. The audience was mainly very quiet and laughed occasionally at two or three very funny lines. I saw four people leave.

The film was very stylish. There were endless references to contemporary art: I really enjoyed the epigrams (Richard Long), the neon sculptures (Tracy Emin and Dan Flavin) and I think a reference to Sylvie Fleury. It really was a visual treat.

As I sat there the film made me feel very uncomfortable. Personally I don't think that it was an entirely appropriate film for the last night of the London Lesbian and Gay film festival. The attendant party crowd was eager to get to the last night do at the BFI and drink free champagne and very understandably so after a long festival.

Dorian as played by David Gallagher was excellent; Christian Camargo who plays Wooten was very well acted. Basil Hallward tended to whine. As uncomfortable as this film made me feel I was compelled to sit and watch it to the very end. There were moments of real cinematic genius-largely during the second half. I kept thinking that the look of the film was beautiful-the colors extraordinary. The split screen devices used occasionally worked very well and seamlessly referencing Gilbert and George.

Consequently I have awarded the film ten out of ten for style, music choices, and production values and for some of the performances. Taking a classic tale and reworking it was a dangerous idea but for sheer audacity I think that Duncan Roy has made a stab in the right direction. On the way over to the BFI my friends passionately discussed the film-we were pretty evenly divided between those of us who really loved it and those of us who either didn't get it or did not bother to try. We all agreed that we loved the color of the film and especially the use of music.

If anything the vapid, vacuous nature of the characters bound up in this slight story added rather than detracted from the film. Wilde caused a bit of the same negative reaction when he published his book. Sadly I know rather too many people like the ones I saw up on the screen on Wednesday night.

A day has since past and I am still thinking about Dorian Gray. The film leaves something indelible-both good and bad in the memory-it is never, ever dull.

Wow what a spectacularly pretentious and boring film. The first act of it is nearly unwatchable and comes off like a bad Calvin Klein "Obsession" ad parody.

I give the film 2 stars instead of 1 because, with a couple notable exceptions, the acting is quite good for this type of movie. Also, I applaud the director for at least trying to be daring. But those are the only compliments I can find for this movie.

I thought that just about everything else in the film failed miserably. The direction was utterly incoherent with only those already very familiar with Oscar Wilde's original story able to piece things together at all in the first half of the film.

The film is unsettling, sometimes presumably intentionally so, because there is nearly constant background noise distracting from the dialog/narrative. Televisions or unseen radios blare out repetitive monologues or inexplicable buzzing sounds can be heard. This aspect could have been worsened by a poor choice of the theater I saw it in where they apparently chose to turn the volume way up so the often mumbled dialog could be heard. Whatever the cause, the background noise was extremely grating. At least the terrible sound mixing would occasionally have the unintended consequence of waking up the bored audience when an inappropriately loud sound would suddenly slap them upside the head. I can see the intention with a buzzing snooze alarm, but when someone setting a glass on a table gives the audience a jolt (and a headache), that is not a good thing.

One of the worst failures of the film itself is the mixing of Wilde's dialog with contemporary dialog. You can certainly take old dialog and modernize everything else about a story very successfully (see "Romeo + Juliet" for one example). And I'm sure there are other movies that mix old and new dialog in a contemporary setting with success. But here you can always tell which lines of dialog were lifted from Wilde because they sound like they came from a much more interesting story. Often times, embarrassingly enough, they are used in a way that suggests the director has misinterpreted their meaning or tried to give them much greater meaning than Wilde intended. This is not helped by jarring and pretentious screens that pop up showing some of the lines of dialog.

So many others have listed other big problems with the film (casual racism, over-reaching and offensive AIDS story) that I won't detail them.

Suffice to say this film is a mess and should be avoided.

Being a great fan of Duncan Roy's "AKA", I was very excited to see this work at the Miami filmfest. Sad to say, I was pretty much embarrassed to have brought my friends to "Dorian Gray." Where to begin? The film was plodding and in great need of editing. The dialog was unnatural & postured..even to the point of being silly. And plot...was there one? The split screens effects were interesting at times and more gimmicky at others. Even cute eye candy could not make you care about the characters or this sophomoric, unoriginal endeavor, for that matter . Most of the audience started shifting around & checking their watches halfway through the film...their thoughts mirroring mine of "when will this be over?!"

Duncan, please go back to narratives