I have the gleaming suspicion that it is impossible to make a complete train wreck of a film based on an Oscar Wilde play, as long as the filmmakers leave most of his brilliantly witty dialogues intact. Case in point: A Good Woman, the Mike Barker adaptation of Wilde’s Lady Windemere’s Fan, relocated to the 1930s Amalfi coast from its British fin-de-siècle origins. The film never really takes off, but what a joy it is to hear one witty pun after another!

 

American divas Helen Hunt (As Good as it Gets) and Scarlett Johansson (Girl with a Pearl Earring) star as two Americans in Italy. Johansson has become Lady Windemere by marrying the perfectly dull Lord Windemere (Mark Umbers), whilst Hunt plays Mrs. Erlynne, a scheming woman who might have a secret too many. The exact plot is relatively unimportant, as all works of Wilde are merely play-length displays of virtuoso one-liners married to a general disdain for the stiff-lipped upper class. This adaptation, written by Howard Himelstein, conserves the former whilst chucking out the latter in favour of a sleek production design and a sun-drenched cinematography that seem to respect its period upper-crust setting without really penetrating it. A Good Woman, as opposed to Lady Windemere's Fan, is not so much about the fragility of the veneer of good manners and taste as it is an exercise in uneasy admiration from a safe distance.

 

The entire production has this opaque quality; even its direction and acting. There is no doubt that Hunt and Johansson are capable actresses (though some may doubt Umbers’ qualifications), but in The Good Woman they are dreadfully dull when they should sparkle. A monologue by Hunt in which she is filmed from the back is especially cringe-worthy; we may chuckle at the clever wit of the words, but the delivery is beyond flat, almost lifeless. Perhaps the problem lies in Hunt and Johansson’s American tongues that are unable to twist their way around Wilde’s decidedly British words (the original was written for an all-British cast). The only two actors who shine are Tom Wilkinson (Johansson's co-star in Girl with a Pearl Earring) as an admirer of Mrs Erlynne and Stephen Campbell Moore (Bright Young Things) as a suave playboy who is after Lady Windermere. They are Brits through and through and one can hear it: they glide through their dialogues as a hot knife through butter.

 

What is left is a polished update of a witty play that never really shines. Wilde’s words remain hilarious even a century after he wrote them, but they alone are not enough to make this comedy worthwhile, especially because his implicit criticism of the upper class has been replaced with the sort of decadence the Campbell Moore character accuses the Americans of having arrived at from barbarism without bothering with creating a civilasation in between.

 

Buy the DVD at: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, dvdGO.es .

Browse: amazon.fr, internetbookshop.it, nl.bol.com, allposters.com.