Wilde.

The very first scene of Wilde promises us that scriptwriter Julian Mitchell and director Brian Gilbert don't intend to coast on the fact that their hero's life was filled with glittering and tragic incidents, but mean to find among those incidents (culled from Richard Ellmann's great biography) the shape and point and impact of a coherent drama.

Young Oscar Wilde is on a lecture tour of the American West. In Leadville, Colorado, he descends a mine shaft named in his honor where he lectures the bare-chested, begrimed toilers on Benvenuto Cellini, a "genius at life." Encouraged by their good-natured reception, he confesses that while being lowered into the bowels, "I thought I was descending into hell until I saw your angelic faces." Everything in this scene - the glamorously burnished darkness, the hushed attentiveness that coaxes the audience-hungry author to display his feelings, the shy homoerotic glance he gives a young miner, and, most of all, the words he speaks - adumbrates the hero's fate.

Wilde will return to London, enjoy brilliant theatrical and literary success while also trying to be a "genius at life," marry a loving wife who bears him two boys, discover and enact his homosexuality, first with nonthreatening disciples and then with the infinitely desirable and infinitely despicable Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, who leads Wilde into sleeping with male prostitutes. This utterly loveless (and therefore undilutedly sexual) world of "rent boys" (or "renters") had always attracted Wilde while filling him with dread. But once he's in this hell he abides for the sake of the angelically beautiful Bosie. And after losing his lawsuit against Bosie's father, pressed only on Bosie's behalf to punish the hated Marquess of Queensberry, the rent boys become the state's prime evidence against Wilde. Then it's hell indeed for Oscar: the ruin of his career and reputation, the loss of his family, imprisonment in Reading Gaol.

The well-researched, well-upholstered look of this film befits the story of a man devoted to the life of the senses. But what stays in the memory aren't costumes or dinner services but the many sudden emotional revelations: Wilde's confession to a friend that his wife is receptive but not responsive, a remark meant to describe conjugal conversations but which unconsciously defines their sex life as well; the unease on the faces of tacit waiters and hotel staff as Wilde and his boys flaunt their sexual natures in public places (one senses behind those poker faces the public outrage to come); Queensberry, having found Oscar likable during an early meeting, suddenly pushing all reconciliation out of his mind while snarling, "But perverts like that shouldn't be charming, dammit!"; the reverberating questions smothered by chit-chat when Constance Wilde arrives unannounced at her husband's townhouse only to find Oscar breakfasting with Lord Alfred; and - perhaps the most piercing moment of all - Oscar's last public triumph as he receives the audience's roar of approval on the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest, his face so refulgent with the moment's triumph that you know he has nowhere to go in life but down.

Stephen Fry doesn't project the intellectual dangerousness of Wilde but, then again, neither does the script. One would never guess from this film that Andre Gide believed his soul was "destroyed" by his brief acquaintance with the Irishman, so thoroughly do Mitchell and Gilbert replace the near-nihilistic picador who goaded established morality with something closer to a hygienic version of Brendan Behan. But within the movie's narrow concept of Wilde, Fry gets everything right: the pride, the slightly naive sensuality, the inalienable graciousness (listen to his tone of voice as he corrects an actor at rehearsal). In the postprison scenes, Fry neatly conveys the toll Reading Gaol took, not by faking haggardness with make-up, but by giving Wilde the air of an ox stunned by an ax-stroke.

The rest of the cast is perfect. Jude Law doesn't just flaunt male beauty but also projects what motivated Bosie: the underlying insecurity of a despised son. Jennifer Ehle, who bugged me with her unending twinkliness in the A&E Pride and Prejudice, realizes Constance Wilde subtly: initially a gorgeous milkmaid citified, gradually a disturbed wife, finally a tragic matron. The reason that Queensberry is so frightening in this movie is that he's played not as an out-of-control mad dog but as a controlled mad dog: Tom Wilkinson finds the method within the Marquess's madness. Vanessa Redgrave seems to understand that Wilde's mother was almost as crazy but in a benevolent way. As the loyal Robert Ross, Michael Sheen conveys sweetness without the least tincture of smugness.

But for all the pleasure Wilde yields scene by scene, does it really achieve the overall coherence that the opening scene promises? I think not. It's clear that the filmmakers are fascinated by their hero and are aware of his complexity, but from time to time they seem nonplussed by that same complexity, and their confusion causes them to send incoherent signals to the audience.

For instance, they set up a moralistic parallel between Wilde's fairy tale, "The Selfish Giant," and its author's own conduct. As readers might recall, the giant's garden is blighted until its owner learns generosity. So, when Oscar neglects his family to cavort with Bosie and rent boys, we hear Fry's voice on the soundtrack reading those sections of the story about selfishness. And when Wilde temporarily drops Lord Alfred to devote more time to wife and sons, we hear Fry's voice narrating the giant's redemption. O.K., that's logical if a bit too tidy. But then, when Wilde returns to Bosie, are we not to understand that as a return to selfishness even if we hear nothing more of the story on the soundtrack? And at the end of the movie, Wilde's life in ruins precisely because of Bosie, his wife dying miserably for lack of the expensive operation she needed precisely because of Bosie, the children abandoned to foster parents precisely because of Bosie, Wilde reunites with his inamorato in Naples, embraces him, and the strings on the soundtrack surge up for the lovers just as jubilantly as they did for Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette in Rome Adventure or Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's. What are we to make of this? A printed epilogue immediately following informs us that the couple split up two months later, but those strings convey neither foreshadowing nor irony. Are we to take the Wilde-Douglas romance as we take that of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, that is, the world well lost for love? But while Cleo followed her Roman into Hades, Bosie abandoned Oscar for country villas, his mother's allowance, and spiteful memoirs. Or are we to think that the filmmakers are endorsing selfishness for the sake of self-realization, however momentary? Oscar, at least in his prime, would have approved that notion, for he thought self-realization desirable at all costs. But he would have been consistent and dispensed with all the moralizing that Julian Mitchell and Brian Gilbert lay on us in the first two-thirds of this very interesting, handsome, worthwhile but not quite coherent film.