As a director, Everett is sometimes heavy-handed, but the performances, and the undeniable injustice of Wilde's ordeal, make for a tragedy worthy of its drama-loving subject.
For every haunting sequence in The Happy Prince, there's five that redundantly wallow in Wilde's misery, which is Everett's point, but it becomes wearisome.
He's a strikingly tragic creature, but "The Happy Prince" struggles to say much more about that conundrum, leaving one to contemplate the potential had [Oscar] Wilde emerged from retirement to fill in the blanks.
Everett tips the movie over into ridiculousness when he starts making barely veiled allusions to Wilde as a Christ-like figure. I don't know if it's hilarious or unnerving to think that Everett must think of himself that way too.
Everett shows little sense of how to structure his material, or how to shoot it, or even sometimes how to act it, but he does have one key element that sees him through: keen insight into Wilde's world and character. And this insight gets him pretty far.