The Picture of Dorian Gray

Plot synopsis:
The plot of the novel varies between each of the published versions. The summary below deals with the longest version, the 1891 novel. However, certain episodes described—in particular Dorian's encounter with, and murder of, James Vane—do not appear in the version originally submitted by Wilde to Lippincott's.
The Picture of Dorian Gray begins on a beautiful summer day in Victorian era England, where Lord Henry Wotton, an opinionated man, is observing the sensitive artist Basil Hallward painting the portrait of Dorian Gray, a handsome young man who is Basil's ultimate muse. While sitting for the painting, Dorian listens to Lord Henry espousing his hedonistic world view, and begins to think that beauty is the only aspect of life worth pursuing. This prompts Dorian to wish that the painted image of himself would age instead of himself.
Under the hedonist influence of Lord Henry, Dorian fully explores his sensuality. He discovers the actress Sibyl Vane, who performs Shakespeare plays in a dingy, working-class theatre. Dorian approaches and courts her, and soon proposes marriage. The enamoured Sibyl calls him "Prince Charming", and swoons with the happiness of being loved, but her protective brother, James, warns that if "Prince Charming" harms her, he will murder him.
Dorian invites Basil and Lord Henry to see Sibyl perform in Romeo and Juliet. Sibyl, too enamoured with Dorian to act, performs poorly, which makes both Basil and Lord Henry think Dorian has fallen in love with Sibyl because of her beauty instead of her acting talent. Embarrassed, Dorian rejects Sibyl, telling her that acting was her beauty; without that, she no longer interests him. On returning home, Dorian notices that the portrait has changed; his wish has come true, and the man in the portrait bears a subtle sneer of cruelty.
Conscience-stricken and lonely, Dorian decides to reconcile with Sibyl, but he is too late, as Lord Henry informs him that Sibyl has committed suicide by swallowing prussic acid. Dorian then understands that, where his life is headed, lust and good looks shall suffice. Dorian locks the portrait up, and over the following eighteen years, he experiments with every vice, influenced by a morally poisonous French novel that Lord Henry Wotton gave him.
[The narrative does not reveal the title of the French novel, but, at trial, Wilde said that the novel Dorian Gray read was À Rebours ('Against Nature', 1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans.]
One night, before leaving for Paris, Basil goes to Dorian's house to ask him about rumours of his self-indulgent sensualism. Dorian does not deny his debauchery, and takes Basil to see the portrait. The portrait has become so hideous that Basil is only able to identify it as his work by the signature he affixes to all his portraits. Basil is horrified, and beseeches Dorian to pray for salvation. In anger, Dorian blames his fate on Basil, and stabs him to death. Dorian then calmly blackmails an old friend, the scientist Alan Campbell, into using his knowledge of chemistry to destroy the body of Basil Hallward. Alan later kills himself over the deed.
To escape the guilt of his crime, Dorian goes to an opium den, where James Vane is unknowingly present. James had been seeking vengeance upon Dorian ever since Sibyl killed herself, but had no leads to pursue: the only thing he knew about Dorian was the name Sibyl called him, "Prince Charming". In the opium den however he hears someone refer to Dorian as "Prince Charming", and he accosts Dorian. Dorian deceives James into believing that he is too young to have known Sibyl, who killed herself 18 years earlier, as his face is still that of a young man. James relents and releases Dorian, but is then approached by a woman from the opium den who reproaches James for not killing Dorian. She confirms that the man was Dorian Gray and explains that he has not aged in 18 years. James runs after Dorian, but he has gone.
James then begins to stalk Dorian, causing Dorian to fear for his life. However during a shooting party, a hunter accidentally kills James Vane who was lurking in a thicket. On returning to London, Dorian tells Lord Henry that he will live righteously from then on. His new probity begins with deliberately not breaking the heart of the naïve Hetty Merton, his current romantic interest. Dorian wonders if his new-found goodness has reverted the corruption in the picture, but when he looks he sees only an even uglier image of himself. From that, Dorian understands that his true motives for the self-sacrifice of moral reformation were the vanity and curiosity of his quest for new experiences.
Deciding that only full confession will absolve him of wrongdoing, Dorian decides to destroy the last vestige of his conscience, and the only piece of evidence remaining of his crimes – the picture. In a rage, he takes the knife with which he murdered Basil Hallward, and stabs the picture. The servants of the house awaken on hearing a cry from the locked room; on the street, passers-by who also heard the cry call the police. On entering the locked room, the servants find an unknown old man, stabbed in the heart, his face and figure withered and decrepit. The servants identify the disfigured corpse by the rings on its fingers which belonged to their master; beside him is the picture of Dorian Gray, restored to its original beauty.

Tags: romantic, murder

Review:
Duncan, what were you thinking???.
Being a great fan of Duncan Roy's "AKA", I was very excited to see this work at the Miami filmfest.
Sad to say, I was pretty much embarrassed to have brought my friends to "Dorian Gray." Where to begin?
The film was plodding and in great need of editing.
The dialog was unnatural & postured..even to the point of being silly.
And plot...was there one?
The split screens effects were interesting at times and more gimmicky at others.
Even cute eye candy could not make you care about the characters or this sophomoric, unoriginal endeavor, for that matter .
Most of the audience started shifting around & checking their watches halfway through the film...their thoughts mirroring mine of "when will this be over?!"Duncan, please go back to narratives.
Disjoint, confusing.
At the Outfest screening in July 2007, the director told us "If you haven't read the book, this picture will make no sense.
For those of you who have read the book, I sincerely apologize." He also said "This is a difficult film." We thought he meant difficult to make, but after seeing it we realize he meant difficult to watch.
He said his intent was to remake "The Picture of Dorian Gray" with the gay undertone highlighted.
For whatever reason, he chose to throw out conventional film narrative style and make an experimental film.
The result is dream-like, confusing, and disjoint.
It's a hard film to make sense of, even if one knows the story well.
If you aren't already familiar with the story, you'll have no idea what is going on.The film does succeed in making explicit the gay subtext of the story and previous adaptations, but don't expect a conventional film..
Terrible, pretentious mess.
Wow what a spectacularly pretentious and boring film.
The first act of it is nearly unwatchable and comes off like a bad Calvin Klein "Obsession" ad parody.I give the film 2 stars instead of 1 because, with a couple notable exceptions, the acting is quite good for this type of movie.
Also, I applaud the director for at least trying to be daring.
But those are the only compliments I can find for this movie.I thought that just about everything else in the film failed miserably.
The direction was utterly incoherent with only those already very familiar with Oscar Wilde's original story able to piece things together at all in the first half of the film.The film is unsettling, sometimes presumably intentionally so, because there is nearly constant background noise distracting from the dialog/narrative.
Televisions or unseen radios blare out repetitive monologues or inexplicable buzzing sounds can be heard.
This aspect could have been worsened by a poor choice of the theater I saw it in where they apparently chose to turn the volume way up so the often mumbled dialog could be heard.
Whatever the cause, the background noise was extremely grating.
At least the terrible sound mixing would occasionally have the unintended consequence of waking up the bored audience when an inappropriately loud sound would suddenly slap them upside the head.
I can see the intention with a buzzing snooze alarm, but when someone setting a glass on a table gives the audience a jolt (and a headache), that is not a good thing.One of the worst failures of the film itself is the mixing of Wilde's dialog with contemporary dialog.
You can certainly take old dialog and modernize everything else about a story very successfully (see "Romeo + Juliet" for one example).
And I'm sure there are other movies that mix old and new dialog in a contemporary setting with success.
But here you can always tell which lines of dialog were lifted from Wilde because they sound like they came from a much more interesting story.
Often times, embarrassingly enough, they are used in a way that suggests the director has misinterpreted their meaning or tried to give them much greater meaning than Wilde intended.
This is not helped by jarring and pretentious screens that pop up showing some of the lines of dialog.So many others have listed other big problems with the film (casual racism, over-reaching and offensive AIDS story) that I won't detail them.Suffice to say this film is a mess and should be avoided..
Bad movie night.
I saw this on opening night at the Miami Gay Film Fest and I, along with about 98% of the audience, hated it.
Everyone left hissing and didn't bother to stay for the Q&A with director Duncan Roy, who was just as pretentious on stage as his film was on screen.
The film itself is clumsy, underwritten, and lazy, supposedly taking place in the 80s and 90s but clearly the budget was too small to hide the fact the backdrop is obviously 2005 New York.
The acting was bad and the placing of dialogue as text in huge letters on the screen is about as film-school- amateur-ostentatious as you can get.
Also the film was obviously trying to say something about the AIDS crisis among gay men but failed to register any conclusive facts or interesting ideas.
As it is, this Picture of Dorian Gray is a sluggish piece if crap that will have a hard time getting theatrical release.
Most likely, the film will go directly to HERE or LOGO or DVD where it will fade into bad movie obscurity..
Disturbing.
Last night I saw The Picture of Dorian Gray with five friends at the Odeon Leicester Square.
The audience was mainly very quiet and laughed occasionally at two or three very funny lines.
I saw four people leave.
The film was very stylish.
There were endless references to contemporary art: I really enjoyed the epigrams (Richard Long), the neon sculptures (Tracy Emin and Dan Flavin) and I think a reference to Sylvie Fleury.
It really was a visual treat.
As I sat there the film made me feel very uncomfortable.
Personally I don't think that it was an entirely appropriate film for the last night of the London Lesbian and Gay film festival.
The attendant party crowd was eager to get to the last night do at the BFI and drink free champagne and very understandably so after a long festival.
Dorian as played by David Gallagher was excellent; Christian Camargo who plays Wooten was very well acted.
Basil Hallward tended to whine.
As uncomfortable as this film made me feel I was compelled to sit and watch it to the very end.
There were moments of real cinematic genius-largely during the second half.
I kept thinking that the look of the film was beautiful-the colors extraordinary.
The split screen devices used occasionally worked very well and seamlessly referencing Gilbert and George.Consequently I have awarded the film ten out of ten for style, music choices, and production values and for some of the performances.
Taking a classic tale and reworking it was a dangerous idea but for sheer audacity I think that Duncan Roy has made a stab in the right direction.
On the way over to the BFI my friends passionately discussed the film-we were pretty evenly divided between those of us who really loved it and those of us who either didn't get it or did not bother to try.
We all agreed that we loved the color of the film and especially the use of music.
If anything the vapid, vacuous nature of the characters bound up in this slight story added rather than detracted from the film.
Wilde caused a bit of the same negative reaction when he published his book.
Sadly I know rather too many people like the ones I saw up on the screen on Wednesday night.
A day has since past and I am still thinking about Dorian Gray.
The film leaves something indelible-both good and bad in the memory-it is never, ever dull..
Very amateur.
I agree with the first poster.
I was also in the audience last night and expected far better than what was shown.
If the director hadn't said the film took place in 1990, one would have never known.
(Besides, the art scene in Manhattan was over at that point, having peaked before the market crash in the late 80s).
And to equate AIDS with getting old is an insult.
The acting was uneven and some of the musical choices weren't inspiring.
It was just plain dull!
I think the applause was polite, out of respect for the director and actor in attendance, but I agree it was a mad dash for the exits.....
Certainly not a movie for the multi-plex or the art houses, but one to go straight to DVD..
Smart, stylish, cool adaptation of Oscar's original.
I really liked it although it's not going to please the multiplex crowd.
David Gallagher is stunningly good as Dorian in this updated version of Oscar Wilde's tale of decadence and debauchery.
The authentic whiff of contemporary corruption and depravity of the New York art world is chilling.
Perhaps some of the other reviewers aren't that familiar with Wilde's text but I think Duncan Roy has created something that has the authentic spirit of the 1890s.Wilde's witticisms and jibes at morality sit very well in a contemporary setting.I was also in the same screening and the audience warmly applauded at the end.This is a relatively low budget production but it looks like great.
I loved the fact that the portrait is a video installation too..
Fantastic!!!!!.
I saw this movie at a film festival in Cardiff and i have to say that i really enjoyed it.
Duncan Roy has done an amazing job of updating the novel to present day while remaining true to Wildes story.
David Gallagher is great as Dorian.
He is suitably pretty and wide-eyed as the more innocent Dorian at the the beginning of the movie but is even better as the dangerous and crazed Dorian that he evolves in to towards the end.
Chistian Camargo (from TV's Dexter) gives a stand-out performance as Henry Wotton.
Probably one of the best Henry's i have ever seen.
While some actors of the past have had trouble making Wildes lines flow naturally, Camargo delivers the lines with ease.
Rebecca Wisocky as Henrys wife also steals the odd scene.
And Noah Segan gave a heart-felt performance as a love-lorn Basil Hallward.
The movie had a cool and edgy look.
Everything from the clothes to the make-up to the sett pieces were a great mix of the very modern meeting the very classic.
Giving the movie a sort of timeless feel.
All together i had a great cinema experience watching this movie and i would recommend it to everyone..
Wonderful!.
Just saw this picture at Outfest and I absolutely loved it.
Don't have a clue what the folks here are talking about.
But as they say an opinion is like an ass, everybody has one and there are too many pretentious ones here who believe to be the worlds film critics.
The film was eloquent,lyrical, poetic and very artistic.
I saw and loved Duncan's previous work AKA and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have seen several versions of Dorian Gray and found this one to be original, entertaining and disturbing.
I applaud the filmmaker for his innovative choices and I know, not hope, that this film will get distribution and released in theatres for I happen to work for a film distribution company, so most other distributors would be doing us a favor if they choose to go with the other negative comments here.
I'd be more than happy to bring this version of Dorian Grey to screens.
I look forward to Duncan's future great works..
Dull, vapid and wholly misjudged adaptation of Wilde's classic..
Last night I witnessed something quite extraordinary - Oscar Wilde's masterful, urbane 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' reduced to something artless, woefully pretentious and, most miraculous of all, crashingly dull.
The promising opening 2 minutes very quickly evaporates like an unreliable memory as soon as the real business is introduced.
Narrative is sketchy to say the least and even a knowledge of the novel is not enough to get you through 90 of the longest and most incoherent minutes I can remember.
The film is tolerably well acted and populated by very pretty people.
There's a particularly well-judged performance by Christian Camargo.
But it's as if the cast have as little sense of where the film is going as the director himself.
Tone and pacing are clueless.
I'm sure that the director believes that his film is a potent comment on empty, drug-fueled lives, but unfortunately there is nothing on screen that ever rises above the predicable and tedious.
With many of Wilde's most famous aphorisms picked out for our amusement, in this director's hands they fall flat like lead balloons.
It's a completely humorless piece.
One joke about Wagner raised a laugh, but the majority of the laughter was of the unintentional variety.
To add to the general unpleasant feel of the film was a scene near the end set in a crack den inhabited entirely by African American people - the only African American people in the film until this point.
It's a long time since I've watched a race reduced to a stereotype as blatantly offensive and ignorant as this.
Just as offensive is the director's portrayal of AIDS - signaled by the word written in a title that fills the screen in giant letters in case we are too stupid to guess what's going on.
Here AIDS is presented as nothing more than a bad case of acne.
Seeing Dorian with a face full of spots does not quite present the horror you'd expect of the infamous portrait in the attic.
The director gives himself more credits than you could shake a stick at.
There was a Mexican wave of laughter along my row when the director's ego enabled him to receive solo credits for production design and executive producer (now, that's desperate) above the title.
The film was shown as the closing night of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and watched by an audience who clearly didn't get it.
As the end credits rolled there was an exodus of biblical proportions, desperate to escape before the director returned to stage to bore them some more..
What the heck is the point?????.
Pointless and badly done update of "The Picture of Dorian Gray".
It takes place (I guess) in 2006.
Dorian (David Gallagher) has some media exhibit done of him by his friend Basil (Noah Seagan) who is madly in love with him.
The exhibit shows Dorian's face and body on various screens.
Dorian says he would never betray a friend, kill somebody or have sex with a man.
Naturally he does all three and the exhibit shows the ravages while he remains youthful.What the hell was the director thinking of when he did this?
First of all an updating of Dorian is not needed.
Secondly he adds nothing to the tale.
And, third, this movie thinks VERY highly of itself.
The characters don't talk--they mumble speeches and, for some reason, the director constantly has other voices on the soundtrack when main characters are speaking.
This just renders some of the dialogue incomprehensible.
Also some lines people say inexplicably appear on the screen in big bold letters.
I guess the director thinks we're too stupid to think things out by ourselves.The acting is as good as it could be.
Gallagher is actually quite good as Gray.
He's tall, handsome with a nice body and is a pretty good actor.
Segan is a little whiny as Basil--but that is his character.
I didn't know what to make of Henry played by Christian Camargo.
He's always giving these vague sentences with a blank look.I did something I never do in movies--I walked out (I wasn't alone).
After about 80 minutes I had reached my point.
The movie was stupid, annoying, incomprehensible at times and--worst of all--dull.
This is a pretentious, needless art film that thinks it's something that it isn't.
A 1 all the way..
Sill pretentious film trying to be smart.
I saw this film at the Toronto Gay and Lesbian film fest.
It seems like such a mish-mash, like Cruel Intentions and Opposite of Attraction rolled together.
In one scene, Dorian picks up a 13 year old hustler (who has more hair than me on his chest) and kills him.
So I asked the director why.
Really Dorian says like 17 times he is straight and would never sleep with a man, then has sex with approximately 100 men, why is he picking up a male hustler to begin with?
And then he kills him for no reason, without saying a word.
The director kind of laughed and asked the audience if anyone would explain it to me, like everyone in the theatre got it but me, which was lovely.
The director also said he did not include nudity because he felt the new trend in gay films was showing nudity and there should be more stories.
This to me sounds very gay republican circa 1985, saying "we're not all hairdressers".
Then he casts the hottest guy I've ever seen as Dorian and talks about how he got an erection while watching the sex scenes in the movie.
Perfect example of this whole film.
Tries to make a point but gets mired down in the semantics.