AN IDEAL HUSBAND
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Miramax Films/Icon Productions Director: Oliver Parker Writer: Oliver Parker, based on Oscar Wilde's play Cast: Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam, Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver, John Wood, Lindsay Duncan, Peter Vaughan, Jeroen Krabbe, Benjamin Pullen, Michael Culkin, Marsha Fitzalan
We shouldn't be at all surprised that "An Ideal Husband," a frothy and witty play with melodramatic undertones written in 1895, could almost take place in our own time. Oh, the clothing is certainly different now. Women nowadays who want to be taken seriously wear somber colors to work, leaving the excessive jewelry and brightly-colored clothes to those not on the fast track, while the raiment was quite the opposite in 1895. And men looking for executive posts now shoulder cell phones and dark grey suits while the upper classes at the turn of the nineteenth century dressed like penguins. But though the apparel ofts proclaims the man, dig beneath the surface and you'll find the same emotions driving us vulnerable human beings: greed, envy, lust, and a desire for power over others. In his play, Oscar Wilde takes pokes at the mores of the haute societe but his thrusts are so muted, so tempered by his gentility and frolicsome repartee, that you sense that Wilde was enamored of England's betters. As for his society's structure, he probably wouldn't have it any other way.
In fact in "An Ideal Husband"--as in Wilde's comic masterwork, "The Importance of Being Earnest"--you'd scarcely know that a commercial class and (horrors) a division of unwashed even existed in England. We meet only lords and ladies even in Oliver Parker's filmed version, which greatly opens the stage play and in fact improves the show. Where a theater director can best succeed by punctuating its sophisticated language with its paradoxes, ironies and all-around wit, director Parker--known for his glowing command at the helm of "Othello"--makes us privy to all the exquisitely decorated rooms in the homes of these aristocrats and the lavish grounds trod by elegant stallions whose grandeur would pass forever with the invention of the automobile.
Where you might expect a satirical work to linger upon the imperfections of the gentry, "An Ideal Husband" turns this convention of the genre on its head. Wilde wants us to realize that we human beings are just that--human and flawed--and that any effort to place us upon pedestals could lead to calamity. Incorporating most of the bon mots of the four-act play, Parker--who penned the screenplay as well- - pares away one major incident involving the theft of a brooch. He adds some depth, however, to the youngest character of the story, focusing on a husband who is ultimately ideal only because both he and his wife can forgive and come to terms with an indiscretion.
The action is launched when the beautiful but icy Mrs. Laura Cheveley (Julianne Moore), once engaged to the idler- playboy Lord Arthur Goring (Rupert Everett), approaches Sir Robert Chilton (Jeremy Northam) at a fashionable London party of politicians and diplomats. She wants Chilton, an influential member of parliament, to give a speech in support of an Argentine canal in which she has a financial interest. Though Chilton knows the canal to be a swindle, he is brought up sharply by Mrs. Cheveley's threat: if he refuses to back the canal, Cheveley will take an incriminating letter to the press which will prove that Chiltern got his wealth through an illegal stock scheme some years earlier. When Lord Goring advises Sir Robert to confess his lapse of judgment to his wife, Lady Gertrude Chiltern (Cate Blanchett), Chiltern refuses lest his wife--who has kept Chiltern on a pedestal--leave him. In a later complication with elements of farce, Lady Chiltern is herself compromised by a suggestive letter she has written to Lord Goring.
Much of the fun of this successful movie adaptation comes from the character of Lord Goring, who at the age of 36 remains a womanizer fearful of committing himself to marriage. In that role Rupert Everett--perfect as a gay man, George, in P.J. Hogan's "My Best Friend's Wedding" but miscast as Oberon in the recent "A MidsummerNight's Dream"-- comes back into his own. He is splendid as a sometimes befuddled but usually astute man-about-town pressured to get married by his bemused father (John Wood) and by Chiltern's young sister, Mabel (Minnie Driver). Driver and Everett function in a subplot as comic mimics to the more weighty relationship between Northam and Blanchett, while the fifth person in this quincunx of quidnuncs, Mrs. Cheveley, plays the others off against one another while scarcely revealing her own emotional vulnerabilities.
The dialogue is anything but flat, virtually every line both driving the plot forward and functioning as a key to the playwright's sense of irony. Like people today, the horsey set in fin de siecle England often communicated cautiously, indirectly, and even falsely, as when Cheveley treacherously assures Goring, "I hate to stand between a man and his past." When in a flashback Baron Arnheim (Jeroen Krabbe) counsels his then-secretary Chiltern that "information can make you powerful," you'll think immediately of mischievous stockbrokers today like Michael Milken, who served a term in jail for feloniously using inside information to make millions
You come away from this movie with a more forgiving attitude toward your fellow human beings, at least until you are hurt by tomorrow's treacheries. Only extremist groups will be disgusted by Wildean notions of grace and mercy. After all, perhaps Cheveley is not so far off the mark in pronouncing morality as nothing more than "what we adopt toward people we dislike." "An Ideal Husband" has an ideal balance of wit, farce, and melodrama, crisply edited to keep the action flowing cinematically from manor to estate, from parliament to the lavish grounds traversed by London society.
Rated PG-13. Running Time: 96 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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