Wilde doesn't glance over the acclaimed author's homosexuality--which is laudable. We've seen enough stories of famous gay men in which their love lives are reduced to a few chaste kisses by a drawing-room fire. Wilde dwells on the physicality of gay sex, following Wilde's growing awareness of his attraction to men from discreet hand-holding to sweaty embraces. And the screenplay by Julian Mitchell emphasizes the ways that Victorian society nurtured such relationships, despite outward disapproval. Men were expected to spend much of their leisure time alone with other men, rather than hanging around the house with the family.

Fry makes a compelling Wilde, and Mitchell's script delves nicely into the social and sexual mores that lead to Wilde's public comeuppance. Then why is Wilde on the whole so dry and uninteresting? Maybe because the movie gives us plenty of Wilde as a nice guy and passionate lover, but precious little of what makes him an important artist. As refreshing as it is to see Fry surrendering to the caresses of Jude Law (who plays Wilde's destructively arrogant boyfriend Bosie), the film doesn't make much attempt to show how Wilde's double life informed his writing. The only samples of his work we experience are a strained, supposedly metaphorical children's story and the incomprehensible last minute of a performance of The Importance of Being Ernest. His lasting gifts--his scabrously amusing portraits of society, his withering bon mots--are shortchanged.

Thus, when Wilde is convicted for "gross indecency" (i.e. sodomy), we understand exactly how he meets his downfall, but we don't really know what the world loses when it sends him to prison. Wilde needs more scenes like its crackling opener, in which Oscar visits an American silver mine and thrills the rugged, unkempt miners with tales of murder and intrigue among European royalty. In this and other moments--as when Wilde trades fishing stories with Bosie's bitter, violent father--Fry's balance of intelligence, courtesy, and multiple entendres demonstrates the places Wilde could've gone. Instead, it stays locked in the bedroom, reducing a great man's work to a footnote in a dirty piece of gossip. Didn't the British courts do that already?