Oscar Wilde’s plays have come around again for movie treatment in recent years, but “An Ideal Husband” and “The Importance of Being Earnest” felt like once-over-lightly versions of these biting works.
Here’s another go, this time at Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan.” The film, retitled “A Good Woman,” keeps Wilde’s one-liners but also shifts around the particulars of the play. It’s a so-so effort with one painful piece of miscasting.
The action has been moved to Italy’s Amalfi coast, in the early 1930s, and some of the characters are now American. A notorious bad girl, Mrs. Erlynne (Helen Hunt), has come for the season – the better to snag one of the rich married men she specializes in.
There are quite a few of them around. For instance, vacationing American Robert Windermere (Mark Umbers) has more money than he can handle and a wife (Scarlett Johansson) easily hoodwinked.
The wife, Meg, is on the radar of a rascally playboy, Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell-Moore). Aside from serving in an important plot capacity, Lord Darlington gets to speak many of Wilde’s sauciest aphorisms (he argues that there’s no such thing as good or bad, “just charming or tedious”).
The bedroom-hopping that ensues is raw meat for the society gossips, who feast on this sort of thing. One gentleman, Tuppy (the gentle and touching Tom Wilkinson), rises above this clatter as he spots something splendid in Mrs. Erlynne.
Not unlike the recent youngish romp through “Pride and Prejudice,” this movie proves that it’s difficult to ruin a great story. There are misjudgments here by director Mike Barker, but Wilde’s idea is still strong.
Other than providing some nice design possibilities, the change to 1930 has little payoff. The Italian locations are pretty, although I’m not sure why everything has to be in the same cinnamon hue.
| A so-so movie: An adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” set on the Italian coast in 1930. The good one-liners are there, but the film suffers from a miscast Helen Hunt and the intrusion of American accents.
Rated: PG rating is for subject matter Now showing: Metroon |
The movie overstates things, which might be the fault of screenwriter Howard Himelstein. He has said, “The challenge was to imbue these characters with the emotional depth that Wilde doesn’t afford them in his plays.” If he really thinks that, he’s missed the point. It’s central to Wilde’s plays that the witty dialogue deflects the delicate emotional lives the characters possess. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” as Lord Darlington says.
Scarlett Johansson is all right as Meg, but the intrusion of American accents into the Wilde material just doesn’t sound good (Mark Umbers, a British actor playing American, fares even worse). Newcomer Stephen Campbell-Moore has fun with Lord Darlington, but you’d have to be brain-dead to screw up that role.
The sore point is Helen Hunt. I have always liked this intelligent, guarded actress, who hasn’t worked often since winning an Oscar for “As Good As It Gets.” But she is completely wrong for Mrs. Erlynne, lacking the wily nature and conventional beauty the role requires. Her nasal voice is a problem, too. It’s fine for comedy, but all wrong for a supposed femme fatale. The miscasting doesn’t kill the movie – but it staggers it.
Scarlett Johansson (below) and Helen Hunt star in “A Good Woman.”
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