Friday, June 25, 1999

'Ideal Husband' speaks with wit, bite and pithy wisdom

Movie Review

'An Ideal Husband'
Rated PG-13
(Worthwhile)
By Susan Stark
Detroit News Film Critic

Not five minutes into An Ideal Husband, you recognize that Oscar Wilde's turn-of-the-century social comedy may be a hundred years old, but that it's prime turn-of-the-millennium material . It speaks with wit, bite and pithy wisdom to today

. "We used to have the rack; now we have the press," Cate Blanchett remarks with a knowing smile to a guest at a political gala that she and her spouse, a young liberal light in Parliament, are hosting. He is the title character, a wise, dedicated public servant and a gentle, adoring husband. He is also a man with a single dark secret in his past.

He turns out to be the least interesting character in the piece. Never mind. Jeremy Northam plays him with a kind of quiet integrity and low-key charm that makes him genuinely if surprisingly endearing by film's end.

When a heavily painted, brittle beauty returns to London from her adopted home in Vienna, she creates an emotional and moral tempest in the genteel, high-minded world Blanchett and Northam inhabit. This ruthlessly manipulative stranger has come home expressly to persuade or, failing that, to blackmail Northam into supporting a fraudulent Argentine canal project, because she has heavily invested in it.

Her ace in the hole: Years earlier, when he was penniless and powerless, Northam gained wealth and power by selling information about a Suez Canal scheme.

All that business about schemes is merely a device to jump-start a scenario that enthusiastically emphasizes character over plot.

The hothouse atmosphere of the play, a definitive drawing room comedy, gains a great deal of fresh air in this adaptation by England's Oliver Parker, who both wrote and directed the film. Purists may balk at the liberties he takes with Wilde's text, particularly at the conclusion, but there's no question that the piece gains vigor by getting out and about in Victorian London.

Then, too, Wilde devotees will find confirmation in the curtain call this film accords the one-of-a-kind writer whose play inspired the film. Same, but more so, for the film's faithful mounting of a near-farcical sequence that brings the key characters together in a closed-doors environment and boots the comedy toward resolution.

In short, the tinkering with Wilde's text is extensive, but there's no question about the film's devotion to its spirit or point of view.

There's no question, either, about the appeal of the cast.

With Elizabeth, Pushing Tin and now An Ideal Husband to her credit, Blanchett has in one short year become her generation's answer to Meryl Streep. She's a wonder.

Northam, since the release of Emma, has quietly, but surely, emerged as the steadiest of handsome young character actors; he's big-screen leading man material if that's the direction he wants to take.

Minnie Driver, as a playful ingenue with a tremendous reserve of smarts, anchors the film with a characterization that becomes a kind of touchstone for viewers. Julianne Moore, a commanding presence in movies since her back-to-back bravura in Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street and Boogie Nights, sumptuously augments her sterling roster of screen credits here in the role of the devious, ruthless villain; she's just gorgeous.

Finally, though, An Ideal Husband belongs to Rupert Everett, the English hunk who plays the pivotal character, the one whose emotional and moral journey provides the comedy with substance to match its glittering wit. First embraced by the international audience in the role of Julia Roberts' best friend in My Best Friend's Wedding, and, most recently, for his steamily regal work in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Everett here shows up as a militantly ironic idler of an aristocrat - funny, profoundly sad and, finally, quite noble.

It's the character, one presumes, who serves more or less as Wilde's persona. In any case, as read by Everett, it's the character who by instinct and conviction most clearly sees from Victorian times to our own times and who acts upon his vision. He gets most of the really spiffy lines in the piece, but it's his heart that upgrades the film's hard shine to real luster.

A Miramax release. Opens today at area theaters.
Copyright © 1999, The Detroit News.

Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
800x600 screen size recommended.

.