The Importance of Framing

The Importance of Being Earnest  

2002  93 minutes

After finding Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, hilarious, I had to watch a movie adaptation.  I was aware a modern movie version was made, so I watched the 2002 version, staring Rupert Everett and Reese Witherspoon.

I am going to critique the writing even though it comes from a British play from the Victorian era.  The adaptation is basically one long, dry, sarcastic parody.  It’s not a parody of the play, but as I interpreted the book, a parody on Victorian society. 

Oliver Parker created the screenplay, and I believe he may have changed the order of the script, but did keep to the majority of the original writing.  I like how the characters were played, senseless and dimwitted, which is how I envisioned the characters from the play.

The production part of this film, that stuck out to me most was framing.  The huge decorative hats changed the amount of headroom that is normally used in many of the scenes.  Usually headroom is very tight on the top of the head, (toward the top third of the screen if you divide it into thirds).  To account for the intricate tall hats, faces were nearly centered (vertically) in medium shots.  Additionally, this issue was actually beneficial to master and long shots.  It created a horizontal line between the taller male actors and shorter female actors’ tall hats that I found interesting.

~Jackie