Flak Magazine: Review of An Ideal Husband, 6-30-99

An Ideal Husband features just the kind of scenario its production design suggests: A virtuous public official has a scandal in his past that may be exposed by a treacherous woman. That woman is the former paramour of the official’s best friend. That best friend is developing affections for the official’s sister and once courted the woman who became the official’s wife. That official’s wife is a childhood acquaintance of the treacherous woman. There’s a scandalous letter or two, a bevy of parties, men clad only in tuxedoes, all kinds of fey dialogue...there’s no mistaking this for anything but an Oscar Wilde adaptation, although you might be suspicious since most Oscar Wilde adaptations tend to be humorous.

Though not without its moments and ultimately worth seeing, An Ideal Husband is strangely unfunny. It has exactly the cast you’d want for such an endeavor — Rupert Everett, Jeremy Northam, Cate Blanchett and unexpected inclusions Minnie Driver and Julianne Moore — and they’re all a delight to the ear and eye.

Just like Everett’s Lord Goring is a hair too dour and imperious to really be charming, however, so is the movie too dark and heavy-handed to really be a Wildean witfest. The tundra that is the middle of the movie drags on and on with the excessive solemnity and low lighting that was a little much in director Oliver Parker's 1995 Othello and is far too much here. Most potential jokes gets wrapped in elegant shadows and fade into the set's perfectly burnished woodwork.

The core of Wilde’s story — about the dangers of unattainable ideals in social and private lives and the necessity of grace in love — comes through effectively on the strengths of the wonderful cast. Still, there’s no reason the film couldn’t have been effective and funny. Parker and company get everything right for the final confrontation between Northam (the official) and Blanchett (his wife) — the surroundings become vibrant, Charlie Mole’s fatally predictable score gets jouncy and everything softens up a little bit to great comic effect...even though the scene is one of the film’s more serious.

That’s part of Wilde’s brilliance — the comedic and serious intermingle so well — but Parker is hesitant to attempt more than one mood at a time and, choosing, favors the serious. In a virtual essay on the potential of high comedy in silent film, Ernst Lubitsch made an utterly graceful and witty version of Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1925 that, though black-and-white, was 10 times more colorful than An Ideal Husband.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)