Books are a kind of platform, which despite the invention of the newer platforms such as cinema and the modern theater still find their audiences and keep their clientele. There are those awkward, slightly uncomfortable moments when an amazing book meets it’s slightly uglier movie adaptation.
Why is there always a lack of agreement between the book writers and the movie adaptation producers? Fans of the works usually tend to disagree with the producer, because they tend to give more credit to the character creation done by the author.
An extreme dissatisfaction with the adaptations of such kind was met by the fans of Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece The Picture of Dorian Gray. Much of this dissatisfaction comes from the poorly casted Dorians. This time I will not judge the actors’ potential to portray the character, but the fact that movie Dorians look nothing like the book one. Some might argue that it’s an insignificant matter I’m discussing here, but again we’re talking about a book based on aestheticism so Dorian’s look is one of, if not the most important factor which every film maker should pay attention to. I mean, how hard can it be to find a perfect match for a divine looking young Victorian narcissist? Pretty darn hard it turns out.
Let us start from the beginning:
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)
Ok, here we are. I felt like after a dozen of cheap and poor adaptations between the 70s and the 00s, someone would finally care to find a match for Dorian, among the bunch of the new and aspiring Hollywood actors, but… I was wrong again. One would think that the brownish hair of the previous actors was far away from Dorian’s perfect golden locks. However, Ben Barnes has straight raven greasy hairstyle throughout this movie. He looks more like professor Snape, from Harry Potter franchise. Not even to mention the dark eyes, which the movie poster editors decided to turn blue in Photoshop (while they remained brown in the movie). Besides the good marketing, IMDb rated this movie adaptation lower than the two I mentioned above. On top of that, movie writer decided to change the original text and improvise on the conversations between the characters expressing some kind of an unnecessary artistic freedom. I was really not impressed.
Penny Dreadful (2014)
Finally, a movie with one of the poorest IMDb scores I saw (4.7) gave a better picture of Dorian Gray (pun intended) than his high budget rivals. Even though Josh Duhamel is 33 years old in the movie, he still gives the innocent and youthful look which the other Dorians missed. This time I didn’t even mind the fact that the he had no curls nor the blue eyes. The actor was simply a great fit for the roll, and the details would probably be taken care of if the film makers had bigger budget in their hands.
Therefore, I’m still waiting for an adaptation worth watching. Until that moments happens, I’ll still gladly reread Wilde’s masterpiece in the book format, because the other platforms were simply not able to translate its genius into a new one.
