June 18, 1999FILM REVIEW
'An Ideal Husband': Wilde as Sensitive Guy, So Wise and InsightfulBy STEPHEN HOLDEN
Political blackmail, insider trading, incriminating documents, sex as a bargaining tool, potential trial by tabloid and sanctimonious public oratory masking frantic behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing.
In some ways, the world of Oscar Wilde's 1895 play "An Ideal Husband" seems awfully familiar. As Oliver Parker's likable, handsome but diluted film adaptation of Wilde's melodramatic comedy enfolds you in a dream world of grand Belgravia houses swarming with Victorian London's beautiful people, madly flirting and exchanging bons mots, it's easy to sink into a "Masterpiece Theater" fantasy of traveling back to a more civilized time and place. Life at the top has rarely looked or sounded more fabulously elegant.
"An Ideal Husband" begins with a grand, formal reception at which the dashing Sir Robert Chiltern (Jeremy Northam) is accosted by Mrs. Cheveley (Julianne Moore), a beautiful expatriate adventurer who has traveled all the way from her home in Vienna to make him an offer he can't refuse. If Robert will reverse his position in Parliament and support a risky, highly questionable Argentine canal project in which she has invested all her money, she will return an incriminating letter he wrote 18 years ago.
If he doesn't, she warns coyly, she will take the letter to the newspapers and ruin his career. The letter reveals that Robert once provided an Austrian baron and close friend of Mrs. Cheveley's with secret information from the British Foreign Office regarding shares in the Suez Canal. The baron subsequently gave a percentage of the fortune he reaped from this privileged information to Robert. The money became the foundation of Robert's own fortune and brilliant career in government.
At stake is not only Robert's political career but also his ecstatically happy marriage to his beautiful and moralistic wife, Gertrude (Cate Blanchett), who worships him as a paragon of virtue. If Gertrude were to discover that he was less than perfect, he confides to his best friend, Lord Arthur Goring (Rupert Everett), she would be devastated and their marriage destroyed. Arthur, a cynical, indolent playboy (and Wilde surrogate) who was once romantically involved with Mrs. Cheveley, advises Robert to confess everything to his wife and seek her forgiveness and support. But Robert, fearing Gertrude's inflexibility, balks.
This elaborate setup is much richer than its neatly contrived resolution, which involves people listening behind doors and a high-stakes wager between Arthur and Mrs. Cheveley that shifts the emphasis of the story away from politics toward romance. Also hanging around waiting for Arthur to notice her is Robert's plucky sister, Mabel (Minnie Driver, in a terribly underwritten role).
In the end, greed turns out to be no match against charm. The repository of that charm is Arthur, the ultimate catch, who is presented as the late-Victorian equivalent of Warren Beatty or John F. Kennedy Jr. in their bachelor days. Far from being a silly, idle twit, Arthur reveals previously undisclosed reserves of wisdom, insight and moral consistency. The dandy who jokes that "to love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance" also turns out to have been waiting all along for Miss Right. He is the only major character to emerge untainted by hypocrisy.
In adapting the play, Mr. Parker has streamlined and rewritten Wilde's dialogue, keeping some (but not all) of Wilde's biting epigrams and scraping off a lot (perhaps too much) of the Victorian crust. As the movie zips along (especially in its second half), the drama begins to thin as the all's-well-that-ends-well mechanics go into motion. The movie's final scenes seem rushed, hollow and stagy, the passionate kisses unearned.
Mr. Everett's Arthur is the subtlest and deepest performance in an ensemble that meshes fairly well while never quite finding the seamless groove of a first-rate stage production. Instead of adopting a conventional Wildean posture and tossing off epigrams like a self-satisfied fop ostentatiously strewing flowers from his buttonholes, Mr. Everett's Arthur is a sullen, secretive gentleman rebel concealing his sensitivity beneath a facade of blasé rakishness. Because the clever words leak out of him instead of being launched like missiles, what he says is all the more truthful and personal.
Ms. Blanchett's Gertrude strikes a winning balance between prudery and warmth with her performance of a hopelessly dated Victorian stereotype, revealing still another side of the actress's chameleon skills. Mr. Northam's Robert is every inch the dashing Victorian hero, perfect but for one crucial blemish. Ms. Moore's slightly too sweet Mrs. Cheveley and Ms. Driver's mugging, eye-rolling Mabel just miss hitting the right sour and comic notes.
If "An Ideal Husband" transports us back to a world that seems more refined than ours, it also flatters us, as Wilde flattered the play's fin de siècle audience, by arriving at a plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face piece of wisdom that after all the preceding badinage may seem more profound than it really is. Hollywood couldn't come up with a tidier feel-good ending -- one that gets everybody off the hook -- than "An Ideal Husband's" concluding moral: Nobody's perfect.
"An Ideal Husband" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The dialogue includes sexual innuendo.
Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
800x600 screen size recommended.