Oscar Wilde |
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance"
film ---- AN IDEAL HUSBAND
An Ideal Husband is a 1999 feature film based on the play by Oscar Wilde. Starring Jeremy Northam, Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Minnie Driver and Oscar winning actress Cate Blanchett. Directed by Oliver Parker. It was selected Cannes Film Festival's Closing film.
Sir Robert Chiltern is a successful Government minister, well-off and with a loving wife. All this is threatened when Mrs. Cheveley appears in London with damning evidence of a past misdeed. Sir Robert turns for help to his friend Lord Goring, an apparently idle philanderer and the despair of his father. Goring knows the lady of old and the plot to help his friend has unintended consequences.
Oscar Wilde's 1895 play, An Ideal
Husband, was made into a movie in 1947 with a stellar cast. (Alas,
we haven't seen it.) Then, a Russian language version was made in
1980 which we wonder if anyone saw. Now Oliver Parker (Othello,
1995, the one with Laurence Fishburne) has "adapted"
the play for a new screen version which he also directed. No
doubt some purists will carp about the changes ("How dare he
revise Wilde!"). In truth, the cuts seem judicious and the
product on the screen is a delight.
If most of the Wildean mots are retained and well delivered, that
alone would make it worth a look - like:
LORD CAVERSHAM: Can't make out how
you stand London Society. The thing has gone to the dogs, a lot
of damned nobodies talking about nothing.
LORD GORING: I
love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know
anything about.
Goring, played to
perfection by Rupert Everett (who we thought was wasted in the
current A Midsummers' Night Dream), delivers such self
deprecating lines with aplomb, letting you know all at once that
1) he doesn't really mean it, but 2) he knows the listener
knows he doesn't mean it and 3) he is very sure of himself
but 4) he's not 100% sure of himself. All that in two seemingly
simple lines. Great writing. Fine acting.
Goring is a close friend of Sir Robert Chiltern (Jeremy Northam),
a distinguished member of Parliament and a rising political star.
Chiltern is in the perfect marriage (to Cate Blanchett) while
Goring, a bachelor, is pursued by Chiltern's sister (Minnie
Driver). Enter evil Mrs. Cheveley (Julianne Moore), a scheming
opportunist who has uncovered an unfortunate piece of misbehavior
in Chilton's past and proceeds to attempt blackmail.
LORD GORING: I am sure she adores
scandals, and that the sorrow of her life at present is that she
can't manage to have enough of them.
SIR ROBERT
CHILTERN: Why do you say that?
LORD GORING:
Well, she wore far too much rouge last night, and not quite
enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
The attempted blackmail tests the
character of each of those involved. The choices they make, as
each decision is made in the unfolding scenario, change our
perceptions of each of them and their perceptions of themselves
as well as each other. By the end, it is not only the perceptions
that have changed; the characters have each been changed by the
events. That gives the play/film a depth of insight and
understanding that makes it resonate beyond a particular society
at a particular moment of time.
Even the lighter foibles of the period that are depicted, and
provide the fodder for some of the best lines, seem to persist a
century later:
LORD GORING: You see, Phipps, Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
or:
LORD GORING: During the Season, father, I only talk seriously on the first Tuesday in every month, from four to seven.
Parker uses his camera to good
effect in illustrating some of these points. As Lord Goring
dresses, and the excess of attention to dress and appearance in
Society is lampooned, Parker gives us a series of shots of men
and women in the ritual of grooming and dressing themselves. It
provides an opportunity to open up the play a bit for the screen.
In the party scene, the camera swoops about the regal mansion,
taking it in from different angles, adding movement where earlier
generations of filmmakers would have remained more static and
stage-like. There is a lovely shot, too, of whirling feet in
shiny black shoes and the flowing skirts of the dancers as they
waltz about the floor. This also seems to be the season for the
Women's Gallery at Parliament which we visit again here, as we
recently did in The Winslow Boy.
The
performances throughout are first rate. Northam is very different
here from his appearance in The Winslow Boy, displaying a
welcome variety in his characterizations rather than falling into
too easy a pattern of mere personality and good looks. Blanchett
is charming and displays a lovely vulnerability. The surprise is
Julianne Moore, an American actress (Cookie's Fortune, The Big
Lebowski) who fits right in with a seemingly perfect accent
and a facility for spinning out the Wilde lines with clarity and
wit. She manages to leave a bit of humanity in an essentially
hateful character. Only Minnie Driver seems out of her league in
this group. In a minor role, Lindsay Duncan shines as Lady Markby.
It is, of
course, an ensemble piece and the entire cast brings it together
with skill and style under Parker's skillful direction
plot
London, 1895. Sir Robert Chiltern MP is happily married to the high-minded Gertrude. One evening, the Chilterns hold a reception. Among the guests are Sir Robert's sister Mabel, his best friend Arthur Goring - and Mrs Laura Cheveley. Laura asks Robert for his public support of an Argentinian canal scheme in which she has invested heavily. Robert turns her down, but Laura reveals she has an incriminating letter he once wrote. She threatens to expose the fraud on which Robert built his wealth if he will not do her bidding. Robert agrees to back her scheme in the Commons.
Gertrude persuades Robert to write to Laura and withdraw his promise, whatever it is. Robert confides his woes to Arthur. Receiving Robert's note, Laura visits Gertrude and reveals to her Robert's secret. Disillusioned with her "ideal husband", Gertrude sends an urgent note to Arthur, requesting a private interview. Expecting Gertrude, Arthur instructs his butler Phipps to admit an unidentified lady and no one else. When Mrs Cheveley unexpectedly arrives, Phipps escorts her to Arthur's study, where she steals Gertrude's note. Now Robert appears, desperate for advice. Hearing a noise in the study, he finds Laura and storms out. Laura suggests a wager to Arthur: she will return Chiltern's letter if he condemns the canal scheme in parliament; if he endorses it, Arthur must marry her.
Robert condemns the scheme, and Laura hands the letter over to Arthur - but posts Gertrude's compromising note to Robert. Mabel claims the note was from her to protect Gertrude. Arthur proposes to Mabel and she accepts but Robert objects to the engagement, believing Arthur is conducting an affair with Mrs Cheveley. Gertrude comes clean and Robert is delighted to discover his perfect wife suffers from human frailty.
A few years ago, Oliver Parker directed a smooth, uninspired film version of Othello, notable for some radical pruning of the text and an attempt to 'open out' the play that consisted largely of velvety shots of torch-lit gondolas. Sadly, conspicuous consumption plus the odd camera flourish do not a memorable Shakespeare adaptation make. For all its prettiness, Parker's Othello ended up in a dull halfway house between theatre and cinema. His new translation of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband shows a similar infirmity of purpose, but with the opposite result. Far from being insufficiently cinematic, it isn't stagy enough. While Shakespeare's muscularity arguably lends itself to full-blooded spectacle, the whole point of Wilde lies in his coruscating effeteness. The overbred dandies of his plays turn tinkling triviality into a badge of honour - they are always acting, even in their own drawing rooms. A smart Wilde production should pursue the air of stilted theatricality to the very limit.
Wilde's epigrammatic prolixity poses obvious hazards for film-makers.
Just about the only adaptation to strike the requisite note of
overripe preciousness was Anthony Asquith's splendidly stagnant The
Importance of Being Earnest (1952). Parker seems to have
assumed that Wilde at full throttle would antagonise rather than
captivate the
Now and then, Parker scores a scrupulously balanced composition (as in the ceremonial two-shots announcing the reunion of the estranged Chilterns), and it becomes clear that he's fishing about for an equivalent to Wilde's formalism. But on the whole, his cinematic elaborations work to sentimentalise the tone. Where Wilde's imponderable ironies keep you guessing as to whether his characters are quite the twittering creatures they appear, the realism inseparable from 'opening out' implicitly obliges you to take them as human beings.
Still, the actors are superbly accoutred down to the last footman, projecting high elegance even when the direction doesn't. Wearing his new camp image like a queenly mantle, Rupert Everett performs an immaculate turn as the closet moralist Arthur Goring. Cate Blanchett makes an exquisitely distressed Lady Chiltern, while Minnie Driver gurgles and pouts as if possessed by the phantom of Joan Greenwood. However, the show belongs to the phenomenally gifted Julianne Moore, who goes from playing a suburban housewife (Safe) to a porn star (Boogie Nights) to the conniving grande dame here, and manages to be fresh and different every time. Perhaps in the interest of softening the role, Mrs Cheveley has been robbed of the great coup de théâtre when she is exposed. But even so, Moore gives the best display of female Machiavellianism since Bette Davis held court over The Little Foxes (1941).
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