Firth, Everett and Dench Bring the Laughs in The Importance of Being Earnest (or Ernest)

What’s in a name? I’ve always found names and their meanings fascinating, and I love the connection mine has with both Ireland and peace. But would I still be me if I were Jane or Mary? And would other people see me the same way?

In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a name is very significant indeed. Two young ladies share the same curious fixation: they have always dreamed of marrying a man named Ernest. There’s just a certain something in the name that inspires confidence. (I stifled a giggle and forced myself to remember, as I watched the 2002 film adaptation written and directed by Oliver Parker, that this story predates Ernest P. Worrell by nearly a century.) Both of them do fall in love with Ernests, but there’s just one hitch: neither of them is actually named Ernest.

Colin Firth plays Jack, a generally decent fellow who divides his time between the country and London. But he has a secret. He takes his leave of the country by claiming to visit his brother Ernest in town, but his brother doesn’t actually exist. Instead, he takes on the name Ernest while in London. Meanwhile, his friend Algy, played by Rupert Everett, often gets out of social obligations by claiming a need to visit his nonexistent invalid friend, Bunbury, in the country.

Algy’s cousin Gwendolyn (Frances O’Connor) loves Jack, but her imperious mother, played by Judi Dench, insists upon approving him first, and she finds his shadowy family history most unsatisfactory. Dench, in the movie’s standout performance, savors each of her lines, milking them for maximum intimidation and wit. She’s a force to contend with, and matters soon become more complicated when the rather unscrupulous Algy turns up at Jack’s country estate pretending to be Ernest, leading him to instantly win the affections of impulsive daydreamer Cicely (Reese Witherspoon), Jack’s ward.

This fast-paced farce reminded me of one of my favorite M*A*S*H episodes, in which Hawkeye invents a captain by the name of Tuttle and finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the ruse of his existence. Here, we have two phony people and two real people using phony names. Naturally, keeping all that straight is just about impossible, and Firth and Everett are hilarious as the friends try to wade their way out of the mess they have made. While the film is more comical than romantic, the couples are believable, and I found the subplot about the affection between Cicely’s tutor, Miss Prism (Anna Massey), and the local rector, Dr. Chasuble (Tom Wilkinson), quite touching.

Absurd circumstances, sharp wordplay and piercing social commentary all combine to make this a very funny adaptation of a literary classic. The actors seem to relish their roles, and the direction helps the movie have contemporary appeal despite the 19th-century setting. All in all, not a bad way to get Wilde.

Tom Cruise Helps Introduce a German Hero to a Wider Audience in Valkyrie

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the Quentin Tarantino movie that I have come to refer to as Inglourious Fellows. That movie strays far from reality, turning World War II into the setting for a spaghetti western in which the heroes always have the upper hand on the villains - though some of their methods are just as despicable. I guess I hadn’t had quite enough of Nazis for one month because the other night, I watched Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, a considerably more sedate film about a group working to bring down Hitler.

Valkyrie, which is based on a true story, stars Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus van Stauffenberg, a German war hero who is disgusted with Nazism and leads a plot to kill Hitler (David Bamber) and show the world that not all of Germany is in agreement with his policies. Kenneth Branagh portrays Major-General Henning von Tresckow, another important architect of the plan, though his chief concern seems to be making Germany look good, and actually succeeding in their mission seems like less of a likelihood to him, at least initially. Putting together an assassination attempt and subsequent government takeover is a complex task, but they manage to find allies in their quest, some more firm than others. One of the most wishy-washy is General Friedrich Fromm (Tom Wilkinson), who is terrified that the plot will fail and he will be found complicit.

Of course, because this is a movie based on actual events, we know that the plot will fail, which puts a bit of a damper on the whole thing. I had never heard of this event before, so I didn’t know exactly what would go wrong, but I knew something would, since clearly, this was not the way Hitler died. I figured the movie would be a downer, and it certainly is; the ending is especially bleak. What’s more, I found it a bit on the dull side, at least in the beginning; once the fateful day arrives, there was enough action and tension to keep me engaged, but prior to that, it’s mostly a lot of nervous strategizing.

There’s little humor to be found in the movie, though there is a dash of romance, thanks to Claus’s wife Nina (Carice van Houten), who remains deeply devoted and openly affectionate to her husband, unrattled by the war injury that leaves him missing an eye, a hand and several fingers. I like Claus, who comes across as a quiet, pensive family man as well as a determined soldier; he’s not as entertaining as Brad Pitt’s Nazi-killing vigilante in Tarantino’s movie, but he’s not as cruel either. He also feels much more realistic. On the other hand, I had an issue with Cruise’s enunciation throughout the movie. I was tempted to turn on the subtitles because it seemed to me like he was mumbling the whole time.

I know the problem wasn’t his accent because he didn’t have one, which I found a little hard to get used to; all of the characters in the movie are German, but Bamber is the only one who switches to a German accent, since the filmmakers felt an English Hitler would be too distracting. Everyone else uses their natural accents, so some sound German, but others sound American or British, and I had to keep reminding myself that they were all German.

Valkyrie is the kind of movie I can imagine being shown in history classes. It illuminates an interesting piece of German history with which I was unfamiliar, and it seems worthwhile to show that there were plenty of Germans who weren’t under Hitler’s spell. While it didn’t hold my attention as well as it might have, I would recommend it to anyone fascinated by World War II.