Whit Stillman's films of the spirit

Austin Bramwell writing in First Things:

It is a truth seldom acknowledged that the most delightful art is also the most didactic. Jane Austen comes readily to mind, as does the best of children’s literature. Supposed counterexamples only prove the rule. Oscar Wilde is celebrated for his dictum that “bad art is always sincere,” but he is in fact one of the most sincere of writers in the sense that in all his works virtue triumphs and vice is defeated. That few of his admirers today realize this is a testament to Wilde’s skill, for so pleasing is his wit that he can lead even the most unwilling reader to accept, even if only unwittingly, a moral truth. Wilde and Austen, to use a phrase that sounds almost paradoxical to modern ears, are delightful moralizers.

In this sense at least, Whit Stillman, writer and director of a charming trilogy of films—Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, and Barcelona—is an Oscar Wilde for twenty-first century America...

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