This is not an easy job to change drama to movie, particularly; The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde’s favorite comedy. So the director and playwright doing a great job to make the movie not only an effective modern film but also respect Oscar Wilde’s original idea.
The movie adds more details to make the story lively. For instance, Both Jack and Algy play a wonderful song in the movie, I don’t really know the name of song, but it sounds great. It make movie good to hear or see. In order to elaborate plot and avoid large dialogue between two people, scenes changes quickly, like house, street or countryside and so on, the director uses the advantage of movie than drama script. Scenes change makes the movie not monotonous, and audiences will have more interesting to watch the movie.
If we compare film to drama, film will give us the same effects in a short time. The play will cost a lot of time to change the costumes and scenes. But if we just watch film in theater, we will see a continuous film, no break. I think it is better to follow the story and go into the film. If we just read the play in the book, a lot of long dialogues make people loss interesting of story.
So in my opinion, film is the imagination of play, we do not have to imagine the story in our mind when we read it. We can enjoy the story through the film.