Did Dorian come across as...
Kind of a dick?
shareYeah, that was the point. Besides Basil's murder, however, I don't think he did anything particularly evil, just morally questionable.
"Why do you say this to me when you know I will kill you for it?"
Well, I was aiming for understatement.
Did it seem like they were trying to play up a redemption angle at the end? I dont recall him being particularly penitent in the book
I need to re-read the book, I can barely remember anything about it.
"Why do you say this to me when you know I will kill you for it?"
There was an attempt at redemption at the end of the book too.
shareAt the end of the book, Dorian falls in love with a pretty young girl in some remote village, and determines to be a better person so he's worthy of her love. But in doing so he finds his painting is even more rotten and decayed than when he was just being evil which, to me, was a message about how there is no such thing as good and evil, only actions and consequences, and that Dorian, even when he was being good, was still being selfish.
In the end he still destroys his painting by his own hand but the movie made it much more of a confrontation, a realisation of 'I am a monster', whereas the book played it up more like a spur of the moment 'I can't take it anymore!' kind of action.
Look at it this way, in the movie Dorian locks himself in with the painting to force himself to destroy it, in the book he just goes to it and destroys it. As I said, in the book it's played up as very sudden and spontaneous, in the movie it's far more confrontational between Dorian and the painting.