But this sort of thing isn't what's really wrong with the movie. The problem is with the script.

Some source material simply requires a lot of heavy adaptation in order to make a movie. I thought that the film version of Henry James' The Wings of the Dove with Helena Bonham-Carter etc. was an excellent example. Very little in the movie was in the book at all, and very little in the book made it into the movie, and yet it was a very fine adaptation. This is because the novel was nearly all descriptions of the characters' psychological states and dialogue between the characters about their psychological states, with the majority of the action taking place "offscreen" but implied or briefly indicated. The movie, appropriately, didn't attempt to "film the book" but instead filmed the action that drove the book's progress without being detailed in the text, and as a result the two works are nicely complementary.

Some source material probably shouldn't be adapted for film at all. I hear there's at least one film version of Remembrance of Things Past, but I can't imagine a worse idea and have no interest in seeing it. What on earth could it contain? The plot!?

Some material is more flexible. It's possible to make an excellent six-hour version of Pride and Prejudice, but also to make a pretty good two-hour version. Adaptation frequently allows or even requires editing or cutting-down of the original. I like both Kenneth Branaugh's and Mel Gibson's Hamlet. There is certainly value in filming the entire text, but I have no beef with anyone who wants to show a less-than-four-hour version. To be perfectly honest, most of Shakespeare's plays have a decent bit of trimmable fat, even after all the superfluous penis jokes are removed. And although Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings has many flaws, I don't think the length, or what he removed, is particularly among them.

But The Imporance of Being Earnest is not, it seems to me, a highly adaptable text. It's perfect for being performed or filmed as it is: brief, tightly constructed, and meticulously detailed. It's not a towering stone fortress like Hamlet, but a delicate and exquisite castle of smoke and air: blow on it or wave your hands at it or look at it the wrong way and it dissolves into absurdity or incoherence, which is just what "writer"/director Oliver Parker does to it here. The play is a mere fifty pages, certainly short enough to be filmed in its entirety, and yet he chops and hacks at it in a wildly irrational manner. It's not that he cuts scenes, characters, events, or conversations--there are no such superfluities to be eliminated--but he cuts lines by the dozen from conversations the entire effectiveness of which are thereby demolished. Where in the play Gwendolen says "You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far" or Jack says "Gwendolen--Cecily--it is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind", they instead say . . . nothing. They fill in with silence and facial expressions. The entire movie is filled with obvious and awkward gaps in the conversation, where the play is overflowing with wit. In the play, nearly every line is either a witticism or it advances the plot (and frequently both). But the movie is full of punchlines without the setup (so that they're no longer funny) and setup without the punchlines (no longer funny, and also pointless).

Wordless idiocy fills in the script's lacunas. For instance, in place of many of their lines Cecily frequently lapses into pre-Raphaelite daydreaming (see, she's imaginative and romantic and impulsive) while Gwendolen gets "Ernest" tatooed on her butt (see, that's why she won't marry someone with any other name! Ha ha!). These scenes are supposed to illustrate the same aspect of the girls' character as much of their excised dialogue does in the play, but instead serve to twist and cheapen them, and are about as entertaining and useful to the film as the "wife back in Sparta" scenes in 300.

Perhaps even worse are the retarded and completely pointless changes to the story, especially the ending. At the end of the play (spoiler alert!) Jack discovers that his name has been Ernest John all along: both of the names under which he's been presenting himself were really his own, prompting the line "Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?" and her reply "I can. For I feel that you are sure to change." These lines are cut in the movie, in which Jack discovers that his true name all along is merely John, and he continues to lie, pretending to discover that it is in fact Ernest. This fouls up the meaning of the play and the coherence of the last scene in any number of ways, and requires other lines to be cut as well. Why did Parker do this? Was the movie not clever enough, did it not contain enough lying, as it stood? The change makes the movie much, much worse and provides only the cheapest titter of knowingness from the audience in return: I find it incomprehensible. Just as bad is the change of Algernon from younger to older brother: what on earth is the motivation for it? It makes every aspect of the plot, from the surprise of the revelation to the reason for Jack's (Ernest's) being named after their father, less plausible, and serves no compensating purpose whatsoever, except to make me angry.

The movie isn't a total loss. The locations, photography, and acting (mostly) are acceptable to good, and enough of Wilde's original is present that it's still enjoyable and amusing in spite of the mounting rage provoked by its ham-handed butchery of the original. 2/5 monads.