Dorian Gray review – the painting is the star

The outstanding performance in Oliver Parker’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s clasic tale of eternal youth at any price comes from the painting in the attic.

Dorian Gray’s abhorrent portrait at first looks suggestively blurred, almost out of focus. Then the modern day fears of a million face cream adverts appear on his face – the dreaded bags under the eyes and at once they become bloodshot.

When a maggot wriggles out from behind one to be stamped underfoot, everyone’s favourite Victorian libertine, Dorian (played terribly by Ben Barnes), decides it might be better off out of view.

The wooden frame around the painting evokes more emotion from the audience than Barnes and at times Colin Firth looks visibly disapointed not in Dorian, but in Barnes’ acting.

Barnes is more boyishly handsome than impossibly beautiful. But there are good things here, good scenes, and more than we might have expected from Parker, turning it in between St Trinian’s films.

Toby Finlay’s screenplay pumps up the homoeroticism – Dorian has a pretty clear idea how to keep the portraitist Basil Hallward (Ben Chaplin) under his, er, thumb.

Beyond mildly risqué bisexual assignations, the filmmaking isn’t terribly adventurous, but cinematographer Roger Pratt (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) gives it an inky opulence, and it’s ultimately watchable.