The Importance of Being Earnest - Movie (week 12)
This week in the lecture we watched “The Importance of Being Earnest”; it stars Reece Witherspoon, Rupert Everett, Frances O’Connor, Dame Judy Dench, Tom Wilkinson and Colin Firth. It’s a fantastic movie and I recommend that you watch it; it’s very funny and witty. Here is the plot overview curtesy of Spark Notes:
“Jack Worthing, the play’s protagonist, is a pillar of the community in Hertfordshire, where he is guardian to Cecily Cardew, the pretty, eighteen-year-old granddaughter of the late Thomas Cardew, who found and adopted Jack when he was a baby. In Hertfordshire, Jack has responsibilities: he is a major landowner and justice of the peace, with tenants, farmers, and a number of servants and other employees all dependent on him. For years, he has also pretended to have an irresponsible black-sheep brother named Ernest who leads a scandalous life in pursuit of pleasure and is always getting into trouble of a sort that requires Jack to rush grimly off to his assistance. In fact, Ernest is merely Jack’s alibi, a phantom that allows him to disappear for days at a time and do as he likes. No one but Jack knows that he himself is Ernest. Ernest is the name Jack goes by in London, which is where he really goes on these occasions-probably to pursue the very sort of behaviour he pretends to disapprove of in his imaginary brother.
Jack is in love with Gwendolen Fairfax, the cousin of his best friend, Algernon Moncrieff. When the play opens, Algernon, who knows Jack as Ernest, has begun to suspect something, having found an inscription inside Jack’s cigarette case addressed to “Uncle Jack” from someone who refers to herself as “little Cecily.” Algernon suspects that Jack may be leading a double life, a practice he seems to regard as commonplace and indispensable to modern life. He calls a person who leads a double life a “Bunburyist,” after a nonexistent friend he pretends to have, a chronic invalid named Bunbury, to whose deathbed he is forever being summoned whenever he wants to get out of some tiresome social obligation.”
The funny thing is that both Algernon and Jack have double identities, and they use the name Earnest in the other town so that they are able to lead two very separate lives. The two main female characters have this notion that they have to marry a man named “Earnest” and so because of this the characters two female characters have an endeavour to find a man named Earnest to marry. It eventually becomes very funny when the female characters find out that their names actually aren’t Earnest and they think that they have become engaged to the same person. I don’t want to spoil the story for you but it is very funny!