Sorry to dampen your spirits. I wanted to like this film a lot but it fails to excite. Fails to ignite and in the end feels like a muddled wet blanket excuse for a movie making experience. Hey, the scenery, the camera work and attention to detail is great. Very evocative. The actual story and editing is less so. It strikes me as the type of film a real enthusiast for Oscar Wilde would make as a homage to the man and then struggle through heaps of revisions and funding cuts and criticism from various studios to get it made and then at the end - prove that the critics were right. It's not very good because the writer's vision splendid didn't really cut through or know what it sought to portray except to say - "I love Oscar Wilde!" Because in the end, we as passive viewers don't really care about Oscar at all. Towards the end of the film, I turned to my wife and whispered to her that this film despite its best impulses, actually damns Oscar Wilde as a self indulgent narcissist. A prat by sheer accident. I don't think that was the intention of the film-makers! She agreed. No real insight to the creative spirit of the man and she lost interest and went to bed. The trailer looked terrific but the movie despite it's best endeavours to immortalise the man - actually makes you lose all sympathy for him and strangely you feel unmoved by his predicament at the end.

"The Happy Prince" is an interesting, sad look at the great poet and playwright Oscar Wilde at the end of his life, when he lived in poverty, declined health and social exile in France. The film seems like a labor of love for Rupert Everett, its star and director, but the finished product looks a bit low-budget and claustrophobic. The shaky camera work was distracting at times. Anyone who loves Wilde will appreciate this film's sensitive exploration of his inner thoughts and emotions, and how he suffered after his trial, incarceration and social exclusion for his sexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas at a time when sex between two men was illegal in England. Although Wilde is shown here living freely in France, he is separated from his two children and his career has been destroyed, so Everett delves into these painful aspects of the writer's later life, partially through dreamily lit flashbacks. "The Happy Prince" is a touching, rather slow film for Wilde fans, but I prefer Stephen Fry's crackling portrayal in Brian Gilbert's "Wilde" (1997), and that earlier film is better overall, perhaps due to superior direction and production quality.

Oscar Wilde - you may have heard the name, you may even know what he did for a living, but did you know what he was like privately? I can only speak for myself: I didn't. I had no idea he was homosexual. That does not take anything away from his work and all the things he wrote. It was hard to sustain or even survive with that sexual preference though, at the time he lived.

Even today there is still a lot of hate against people who identify as gay. Mostly disguised as religious believe, people get a lot of hate. It is more than a shame we have not overcome these things and seem still not able to just let people live their lifes the way it makes them happy. Now go back over a century. As I said, I had no idea about his sexual preference, so I didn't know what this would be about and I also cannot attest if the movie depicts things as close to the truth as they happened. But the story is quite engaging and the actors do the rest. If you are not easily offended by what this movie is about, it is quite decently told