'A Good Woman'

By Norman Wilner, Zap2It.com | June 13, 2006

Helen Hunt in 'A Good Woman'

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Even if you haven't seen "A Good Woman," you've seen it. Mike Barker's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1892 play "Lady Windermere's Fan," about the scandal that erupts when a woman of questionable means crashes the high-society swells vacationing in Italy, is one of those well-meaning literary adaptations that does its best to bring Respectable Drama to the masses, but winds up burying the material in a landslide of costumes and accents.

Oh, the music is jaunty and the dappled sunlight is positively art-directed in the way it bounces off everyone's cheekbones, and the Wildean quips fly back and forth like sparrows in springtime. But screenwriter Howard Himelstein gets a little greedy, stuffing his dialogue with lines from Wilde's other works, so that every character gets at least one good aphorism. The result is a movie that feels compulsively witty, rather than inventively so; it's like an obnoxious party guest who insists on punctuating every beat of his conversation with someone else's cleverness.

There are other problems, too. While the decision to move the action to 1930 does let the stars flounce about in some marvelous flapperwear, it doesn't really serve the story all that well, and kind of ignores the whole World War II thing. And although Helen Hunt overcomes her miscasting as Mrs. Evelynne, the walking scandal whose very presence threatens the bliss of newlyweds Robert and Meg Windermere, Scarlett Johansson -- who plays Meg -- does not. She's just too contemporary, and too strong, to be believable as the fluttery mass of self-doubt Meg has to be.

Only Tom Wilkinson really nails the tone as Mrs. Evelynne's wealthy, would-be suitor Tuppy: He captures the elegance and grace of the text, letting his character take self-mocking comfort in his own limitations. Every time he breezes in, we get a glimmer of the movie that might have been.

Lionsgate's enhanced-widescreen DVD (distributed by Maple Pictures in Canada) offers a single extra: Audio commentary by director Barker and producer Alan Greenspan, who sit back and complement one another about how splendid things were on the set, how lovely it was to shoot in such lush locations, and how all the changes they made to Wilde's text work so well. How bloody wonderful for them.

STUDIO: Lionsgate Home Entertainment (US) / Maple Pictures (Canada)
RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2006
RATING: PG
PRICE: $27.98
TIME: 93 minutes
DVD EXTRAS: English and Spanish subtitles; audio commentary
INTERNET SITE: agoodwomanthemovie.com