Review of A Good Woman (2004) by Daniel R — 02 Jan 2013

Helen Hunt gives perhaps the worst line readings of her career and Johansson gives the most wooden performance I've seen her give, but the rest of the performances are good.

Regarding the liberties taken with the play, I think that's actually the film's strong suit. Within the play itself, most of the exposition is handled with soliloquy. In a film, you can do that by letting the characters break the fourth wall--the more recent film adaptation of "Richard III" is an example of doing this well--but I applaud the decision to add a expository sequence that weaves most of that material into a linear narrative. Also, given that there ARE scenes featured exactly as Wilde wrote them, and Wilde is without parellel among playwrights active towards the more modern end of things, I think it speaks to the strength of Himmelstein's writing that they only stand out starkly if you are familiar with the play and recognize the quotes.

On a structural level, what I identify as the film's major weakness is the 1930s setting. You can't believably set a film in 1930s Italy without SOME acknowledgement of the Depression and the rise of the European fascists. The film does address the Depression at one point, but identifies it as an American, not a global, problem. If this is meant to speak to the characters cluelessness about what is going on around them, it was either executed badly at the script level or lost in the editing.

Moreover, I think they only set it in the early 20th century so they could update Wilde as much as possible without loosing the mocking of high society as presented in the original work. I think that points to either the writer possibly not knowing what the story was really about or not wanting to lose some of the more biting Wilde dialogue. If the writer insisted on making that choice, it would have been wiser to set it in the 1920s, which would have avoided the awkwardness of showing these characters living in untroubled decadence during a global economic depression and made Erlynne's backstory even more reddeming by putting her youth in the end of the era of the robber barrons rather than in the Gilded Age.