Estelle Parsons, the play’s director, doesn’t weigh in on the matter, which remains a puzzling and uncomfortable choice to depict a lustful king busy putting the moves on his 15-year-old stepdaughter.

Why, in the role of King Herod, he felt compelled to adopt a whiny, high-pitched voice with gay inflections is a question posed by a journalist in the film, to which Pacino has no answer. Pacino’s professed identification with Wilde seems to have one bizarre consequence. From being the toast of society and the most famous writer of his day, he found himself disgraced, ill, impoverished and alienated from his beloved children. A married man who doted on his children, Wilde fell in love with a young aristocrat and was arrested and sentenced to two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol, under a new English law that punished homosexuality. Travelling to New York, Dublin, London and Paris, he interviewed luminaries like Tom Stoppard, Gore Vidal, Bono, Tom Kushner and Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland, all of whom have something interesting to say. Pacino describes how he felt increasingly drawn to Wilde as he investigated his life and its influence on the play. theater before an audience, recreated on a sound stage, and with a different cast in the middle of a desert, the least necessary part of the film. Large chunks of the play are performed in three formats: as a reading in an L.A. PHOTOS: The Scene at the Venice Film FestivalĪs in Looking for Richard, it is a treat watching skilled actors build their performances during rehearsal, particularly the luminous young Chastain (this is her first film role), Kevin Anderson as Jokanaan/John the Baptist and Roxanne Hart playing Salome’s smarmy mother Herodias. Editors Roberto Silvi and David Leonard do a Herculean job compiling very disparate material into an engrossing, smooth-flowing film. Researching Salome, which he performed twice on stage, becomes an “obsession” as he struggles to find the right mixture of the play, Wilde, himself making the play and making a movie about all of the above. Fifteen years after his first directing stint exploring Richard III, Pacino is older but as curious and energetic as ever, hammy, moody and likeable by turns.

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