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AFTER "Shakespeare In Love" and "Elizabeth", audiences hunger for
starched collars and lace petticoats once more. Surely, this is the
moment to rediscover the wittiest man in England. Oliver Parker directs
with the fluidity of a brick. There is so little activity on screen,
Rupert Everett looks planted. His charm is irresistible, his smile disarming,
but when he leans into the room to take a step, you feel his roots stretch.
Lord Goring (Everett) is the son of an Earl, flagrantly idle and damnably
good at it. His repartee is mined with self mockery and peppered with
aphorisms. "I love talking about nothing," he brays. "It is the only
thing I know anything about."
Oscar Wilde's plot is ingenious. Goring's friend, Sir Robert Chiltern
(Jeremy Northam), married to the beautiful and intelligent Gertrude
(Cate Blanchett), is being blackmailed by a lady from Vienna, Mrs Cheveley
(Julianne Moore), who, two husbands and a few years prevously, had been
"engaged" to Goring.
Chiltern is an ambitious politician, tipped for high office. The blackmail
concerns an earlier indiscretion, one that even his wife knows nothing
of. Cheveley wants him to give verbal backing in parliament to a South
American canal scheme, in which she has invested heavily. He knows it
to be a fraud. What to do? Lie and save himself? Or stick to his principals
and be ruined by a scandal?
The performances are rapier sharp, especially those of Northam and Moore,
who demonstrates beautifully that Gwyneth Paltrow is not the only American
actress with a tuned ear for the Ascot accent. Minnie Driver, as Chiltern's
sister, Mabel, seems a very modern young lady. This is the London season
of 1895, where "people are either hunting for husbands, or hiding from
them", not a fancy dress ball in 1995.
Parker's first film, "Othello", with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth
Branagh, sank without trace. "An Ideal Husband" won't sink. It has Wilde's
words and too fine a cast. The interiors may be dark and oppressive,
the theatrical origins barely concealed, but the spirit of Oscar remains
irrepressible. "I swear on my life," Goring assures Mabel, "to be utterly
trivial." He is a man of his word.
The Wolf
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