An Ideal Husband
With Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver, Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam, John Wood, Lindsay Duncan, Peter Vaughan, and Jeroen Krabbe.
I’ve seen An Ideal Husband, writer-director Oliver Parker’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play, twice–once before reading the original and once after. In Connolly’s terms, it was a bit like going from Oscar to Oscar plus Wilde and then back to Oscar again.
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I don’t mean to imply that Oscar isn’t a witty and entertaining fellow; indeed, he’s so much of one under Parker’s guidance that he’s never allowed to be anything else for long. Wilde, the more serious author of the brilliant “The Critic as Artist,” an essay in the form of a dialogue, is never allowed to be much of anything. This doesn’t mean that Parker should have adapted Wilde instead of Oscar. Much of the four acts of An Ideal Husband, a serious comedy, is constructed out of flip one-liners, most of which remain, though Parker has added a few, all unworthy of the master (including one about the proverbial frying pan and the fire). In the movie Wilde the serious author is a bit like the cameo of him (Michael Culkin) offering a beaming curtain speech after one of his plays; most of the characters are attending the play, but most of them aren’t paying much attention to the speech. In a way, that seems to be how we’re expected to attend to this play and its author–our focus skipping like a rock from one epigram to the next, while we take in the opulent, continually shifting scenery, the frequently changing formal attire, and the intermittent, delightfully incongruous bursts of Gypsy music, which makes the whole thing feel like a musical.
Missing from this hyperbolic account is how Miramax’s meddlesome Harvey Weinstein probably took this improved structuring and strengthened adaptation of an already terrifically contemporary, people-oriented play and made it even more terrifically contemporary, structured, strong, and people oriented through his customary process of “improving” whatever merchandise he feels like getting behind. Whether this meant rescoring (as he insisted be done for The Wings of the Dove) or recutting or something else, we may never know.
The movie is attentive to Wilde’s plot but relatively impatient with what it signifies as long as it can find more spreads and epigrams to distract us with. Goring is a clear stand-in for Oscar, which the film plays for everything it’s worth, yet it avoids showing the degree to which Sir Robert is an equally relevant, if less obvious, stand-in for Wilde. If Goring embodies Oscar’s wit, Sir Robert, accorded few of the one-liners, embodies Wilde’s social position, which was already threatened.
