Reviewed - A Good Woman: Oscar Wilde suffered enough when he was alive, so it is some mercy that he didn't live to witness what recent movies have done to him and his work.
The leaden 1997 biopic, Wilde, starring an embarrassingly miscast Stephen Fry, and such misfired screen adaptations as Ken Russell's bizarre Salome's Last Dance (1988), Oliver Parker's passable An Ideal Husband (1997) and dire The Importance of Being Earnest (2001), and now Mike Barker's giddy A Good Woman, which takes its title from the subtitle of Wilde's first theatrical success, Lady Windermere's Fan: A Play About a Good Woman.
Barker and screenwriter Howard Himelstein take several unwise liberties with the play, transposing it from 1890s London to the Amalfi coast of Italy in the 1930s and turning several key characters into Americans. In a curiously remote performance, Helen Hunt plays the golden-tressed gold-digger, Mrs Erlynne, who escapes from New York - and a pile of unpaid bills - to the Italian Riviera.
Mrs Erlynne takes an interest in newlywed American socialites, Robert and Meg Windermere (Mark Umbers and Scarlett Johansson). Before long she is the relieved recipient of regular cheques from Robert, prompting suspicions that he is having an affair with the older woman, while Meg attracts the attention of dashing Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore).
Moving the source material to the Italian coast serves to open out the play from its confined drawing room settings. But while the locations are attractive, the result amounts to little more than a travelogue with aphorisms - many thrown away through mistimed delivery.
Only the redoubtable Tom Wilkinson, ideally cast as Tuppy, the millionaire hopelessly smitten with Mrs Erlynne, properly gets into the Wildean spirit of things in an oddly flat production that is crucially lacking in energy and rhythm.
Michael Dwyer
