Interesting movie based on Oscar Wilde's play. Although it seems a bit toned down, it still is a very fun movie to watch. It has various plot twists, and where other playwrights would have stopped early on during the revelation of multiple Earnest, and then slap together some closure with a happy ending, this movie keeps on going, slowing stitching back the relationship together, and it keeps on going to the very end, literally up to the last sentence.

The film has some very witty dialogue and interesting word play, although I do feel that the wickedest sarcasm has been mellowed down a bit, either by pacing or just edited out.

Director/screenwriter Oliver Parker should be ashamed of himself. How on earth he managed to turn a blithe and sparkling comedy played by a superb cast into a stumbling and tiresome grind is quite beyond me, but he managed it, and in spades.

First, he dragged it out abominably. Wilde works best when ripped through at a spanking pace. It's fast and punchy, definitely part of the modern era, but Parker paces it like a funeral procession. Exchanges that are supposed to be quickfire are instead drawled, with irksome yawn-inducing pauses between the retorts.

Second, he padded it with some utterly unnecessary flashbacks, that add nothing that's not clearly covered in the exposition. We don't need to be shown it, especially as that just detracts further from the flow of the scenes.

Thirdly, even while doing this, he somehow manages to butcher some of the most vital and sparkling scenes with clumsy script cuts, notable Gwendolen and Cecily's first meeting. Instead of a rasping and pummelling duel, we are treated to an insipid and truncated tiff. Why on earth he chose to elide Gwendolen's second statement about her first opinions is baffling beyond all comprehension.

Fourth, he apparently failed to notice that the harsh lighting in most of the scenes makes all of the cast, even Ms Witherspoon, look much older than necessary, and certainly older than they should be.

Fifth, he shoehorned in some dreadfully awkward and quite out of character physical buffoonery, completely at odds with the tone of the piece.

The superb cast is wasted: poor Judy Dench is reduced to whispering her character's iconic line, I can only assume in an overly ostentatious attempt to distance this performance from previous Ladies Bracknell. Firth, Everett and O'Connor are all just a little too old to pull off their roles, and worst of all, none of the cast seem to be having any fun during the production.

This is a dreadful version of what should be a rip roaring play, that fails and disappoints on every front. Badly done, Mr Parker, badly done indeed.

Nicely executed comedy of mixed-up names and fake identities leading to an improbable happy ending.

It's interesting to compare this with the 1953 version that starred Michael Redgrave and Richard Wattis. They're both successful but I think the modern version slightly edges the earlier version out, although it's difficult to beat that 1953 cast -- Joan Greenwood, Dorothy Tutin, Edith Evans, Miles Malleson.

The earlier version has a lighter and less subtle approach. Everyone involved seemed to know this was a comedy and it's all very gay and casual.

There's more subtlety here, especially from Colin Firth because he plays it as if he were an ordinary, richly embarrassed man. The guy is superb. Anna Massey is great too as the governess. It's making me feel ancient to remember that she was such a goofy-looking but sexy dish in Hitchcock's "Frenzy." If you must have a replacement for Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism, Massey will do. As the two girls involved, Reese Witherspoon is very Aryan and Frances O'Connor is canny.

Judi Dench is Lady Bracknell and she has some of the funniest of Wilde's more extravagant lines. When a man is on his knees, about to propose to a girl, she orders him to "remove yourself from that semi-recumbent position; it's most indecorous." Even Edward Fox, in the small part of Firth's butler, is exemplary, muttering in his usual obsequious tone as he serves the tea about his overdue wages.

The director departs from the earlier format by not shooting it as a staged play. Ladies gallop on horses, men grapple over a bunch of bluebells, the source music is close to ragtime, there are a couple of whimsical fantasies shown that are more colorful than engaging.

But -- well, how can you beat those florid expressions? A doorbell rings and someone sourly observes, "It must be a relative. Only relatives and predators would ring in such a Wagnerian manner."