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This may sound a little hypocritical after not following my elders' example and walking out of a movie in which Jimmy Breslin himself describes the title character as "that sick f**k," but I personally could stand a kinder, gentler Hollywood. If you've read it once in this column, you've read it a dozen times: it doesn't take a machete in the head or nuns on a waterbed to provide quality entertainment. But since genuine cleverness is difficult to come by, the preponderance of movies built on body fluids is increasing. So it's a real treat to heartily recommend that everybody looking for a respite from the usual go see An Ideal Husband...even if it is based on the play by Oscar Wilde, who knew a thing or two about variety in the boudoir. (There's a point here too, though: just because a guy's body was reportedly so wracked by excess that it exploded after his death doesn't mean he couldn't craft perfectly genteel diversion.)
This version, the fifth film treatment of Wilde's farce, is adapted and directed by Oliver Parker, who did the 1995 version of Othello. Set in 1895 London, "where people are either hunting for husbands or hiding from them," it stars the perfectly cast Rupert Everett as Lord Arthur Goring, a wealthy scion whose chief pursuit is avoiding work and marriage. Despite his upper-crustiness, he's genuinely likable for a fop, mainly because he's wholly without pretense, unabashedly sprinkling his conversation with such witticisms as, "I love talking about nothing; it's the only thing I know anything about," and "To love one's self is the beginning of a lifelong romance." He's friend to Sir Robert Chiltern (Jeremy Northam, who was just in the similarly refined The Winslow Boy), despite earlier in life having had the only marriage proposal he's ever given turned down by Gertrude (Cate Blanchett -- geez, do these English stick together or what?), now Robert's wife. The couple is fabulously happy and prosperous, and Robert is earnestly climbing the political ladder based on his reputation as an honest minister in a government full of scandal and scoundrels. Things are going so well you could almost choke.
But what fun would that be? Enter Mrs. Laura Chevely (Fayetteville, North Carolina's own Julianne Moore, thank god, sporting an accent to make the limeys British-Leyland-Green with envy), wealthy double-widow, to hatch a wonderfully timed blackmail plot: if Robert doesn't revise a speech that will effectively trash a questionable government project in which she's heavily invested, she will reveal a ruinous secret about his financial past. Oh, and Mrs. Chevely has the hots for Arthur...who may finally be feeling the first pangs of outgrowing bachelorhood, developing a sincere admiration for Robert's sister, Mabel (Minnie Driver -- which in England isn't just a name, but also an occupation). Before long we've got people sneaking around, arranging clandestine meetings via messenger, spying on each other through opera glasses while attending a play by who else but Oscar Wilde, and stumbling through horrible misunderstandings and unfortunate complications.
An Ideal Husband has all the elements of our own recent national scandals: politics, money, and sex. The difference is, we can enjoy it, because it's delightfully fictitious (or at least a century removed) and well-acted, the sex is of the underlying-passion sort rather than the "Why didn't you have that dry cleaned?" variety, and the story revolves around a character who, except for one past indiscretion he regrets terribly, is such an upstanding sort that this movie could have almost been titled "Master Smith Goes to Parliament." B+
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