Remake would drive Oscar wild

Oliver Parker's screen version of one of the most perfect theatre comedies ever written is the equivalent of driving a vintage Bentley at full speed into a tower block. With one notable exception, nothing survives the wreckage.

In the hands of someone who knows what he is doing (like Baz Lurhmann with Romeo and Juliet) the remodelling of a classic for the modern audience is sometimes justifiable. Parker's problem is that he has neither confidence in nor respect for his raw material. He "opens out" the action (which is intentionally claustrophobic) with tiresome inserts of banal fantasy. For example, Cecily (Reese Witherspoon) imagines herself as a Burne-Jones damsel awaiting rescue by a Pre-Raphaelite knight.

Then there is the unnecessary "business" with which Parker clutters up the screen; Algy (Rupert Everett) and Jack (Colin Firth) disport themselves in a music hall and are later paired to perform a comic song. Worse, he persistently underscores the dialogue with the most annoying music I've heard in years, comprehensively ruining the pace and timing of the language.

As a consequence, everyone suffers: from Everett (surely born for the role), who makes the tactical error of playing Algy as a cad from Victorian melodrama instead of Wilde's engaging dissolute, to Judi Dench, whose Lady Bracknell is an underwhelming bore rather than a socially conniving grotesque.

Just about everything is wrong with this farrago. The sets and design are lurid, the editing ridiculously busy and the continuity hopeless (someone lights a cigarette already clearly smoking; a cake disappears).

The only one who emerges with any credit is Firth, who invests Jack with precisely the right kind of English stuffiness and delivers the lines with the clarity of thought and cavalier insouciance for which they were designed.

For the rest, Parker has achieved the unthinkable: he has turned champagne into ditch-water.

Oscar would not just be wild, he'd be mad as hell.

The Importance Of Being Earnest (1952 Version)
Cert: U