A Good Woman, Perhaps, but a Bad Film
(originally posted on IMDb 15 September 2018)

I've read Oscar Wilde's play "Lady Windermere's Fan," and I don't care too much for it, which seems to be a sentiment partially shared by the makers of this adaptation of it, "A Good Woman," a title that is taken from the last words spoken in the play. So I fully support an "opening up" of it--adding to and expanding the narrative--and an updating, both of which Ernst Lubitsch's 1925 version did remarkably well and which the 1949 "The Fan" partially mucked up. One thing I do like about the play and Wilde's writing in general are the epigrams, another sentiment that's obviously shared by the filmmakers here. In fact, one of their main concerns seems to have been that Wilde didn't include enough of them, so they mined his other works for more. Recently, I've also read Wilde's only novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," and was rather surprised to hear it quoted so often in an adaptation of another work. The filmmakers also saw fit to rewrite some of them. The ending of "Crying is the refuge of plain women," for instance, is changed from "but the ruin of pretty ones," to "pretty women go shopping." Taking lines from "The Nutty Professor" (1996) seems too far, but otherwise I'm fine with the additional and sometimes altered witticisms. The problem is that they seem to exist as a separate entity from the narrative. It's as though "A Good Woman" were two films: one of some people mostly sitting around telling each other jokes and the other a series of melodramatic love triangles and, since we're in the mood to randomly quote, "never the twain shall meet."

Unfortunately, Scarlett Johansson spends most of the film either crying or shopping, and most of the acting here is either unremarkable or ill-fitting comic relief. The exception is the chemistry between Helen Hunt and Tom Wilkinson, both of who add some modernity to a Victorian-aged morality tale. And while I would agree with some critics who regard Wilde as an early modernist, I don't see it in "Lady Windermere's Fan." I see a rather conventionally Victorian sermon on manners and morality disguised as a satirical critique of those very manners and morality, especially in regards to its treatment of women. The characters seem to be poorly developed and relatively interchangeable mouthpieces for Wilde's wit, too, as they are in this film. But, Hunt's Mrs. Erlynne is something of a "new woman," albeit one whose independence is based on extortion and being a serial mistress to wealthy married men. She refuses to marry a man who will confine her, and that's how Wilkinson's "Tuppy" likes her. Meanwhile, I couldn't care less what happened to the Windermeres or Lord Darlington.

Never mind that this updating and relocation of the story to Italy renders Wilde's critiques of Victorian-era high society rather nonsensical, or that it seems odd there's no reference to the Great Depression or Mussolini. That's the least of it's problems, but at least they got something right. I also like that there's a scene where the social clique spy on Mrs. Erlynne and Tuppy at the theatre, even though it's essentially a relocated reworking of the race track sequence in Lubitsch's film, and it would've been better had they been watching one of Wilde's plays, as in another similar scene from an adaptation of one of Wilde's scripts, "An Ideal Husband" (1999). I like how this play-within-a-play moment recognizes where the show truly is--that the only thing interesting going on is between Hunt and Wilkinson.