Review of A Good Woman (2004) by Robert W — 08 Jun 2010

"A Good Woman" is Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan" given a kind of Merchant/Ivory treatment and relocated in the sunny Italian city of Amalfi in 1930, where a colony of idle upperclass Englishmen and women are enjoying a life of leisure and gossip not unlike that depicted in Goldoni's "La Villeggiatura.".

Though I saw two performances of the play back in the early 1990s (one of them a live one by English students), they were not fresh enough in my memory for me to determine what was in the original, what was left out, and what was added or transformed. Most of the quotable bits, the ones you'll find on the Internet, seemed to be there (they usually tend to be delivered with such a self-conscious cleverness that you probably won't miss them), but the tampering with the text appeared to be much more extensive than with most screen adaptations of plays.

The film is about three men and two women: one actual couple, and three potential ones. The actual couple - Scarlett Johannson and Mark Umbers - is supposed to be the focus of the story, but Umbers, who looks like a model for romance novel covers, is much too bland, while Johansonn is her usual mixture of juvenile boredom, slightly amused languor, drowsy sexuality and pouting disdain. The Oscar Wilde proxy, Stephen Campbell Moore, also lacked maturity in my opinion, and felt a bit lightweight and unthreatening in the role. As a result, I was drawn more to the burgeoning love story between Helen Hunt and Tom Wilkinson, though it was not clear at first that the film would be going there.

"A Good Woman" is quite watchable, and even managed to make me shed a tear, as redemption stories usually do. But I am almost certain that I will find more to enjoy the stage version included in the "Oscar Wilde Collection" set of DVDs.