An Ideal Husband

An ideal, by definition, is timeless, and what better time for Oscar Wilde's play about an ambitious politician nearly thwarted by an old financial scandal than in a world still trying to shake the name Monica Lewinsky from its lexicon? Unfortunately, Oliver Parker's adaptation of the doomed wit's most poignant play, despite a formidable and misused cast, is as overstuffed and inert as the furniture. Looking a trifle weary of this bit after The Winslow Boy is Jeremy Northam as Sir Robert Chiltern, a rising MP with an unimpeachable reputation and an unsettling taste for power. Wife Gertrude (Cate Blanchett, her Elizabethan fire reined in by Edwardian primness, and the best thing in the movie) adores him, which makes the intrusion of suave, soiled Mrs. Cheveley (Julianne Moore, too femme to be fatale) and her blackmailing letter all the more galling. Sir Robert's only hope is "the idlest man in England," his disreputable, foppish friend Lord Goring. As the latter, Wilde's persona, Rupert Everett steals the show shamelessly, but he adds little subtlety or credibility to his role as paradoxical moral voice in the midst of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and inconsequentiality. He gets the best lines -- they are wasted on Minnie Driver in her ungainly turn as Sir Robert's spunky, smitten sister Mabel -- but they are thinly scattered about the carriages, potted palms, and splendid heliotrope gowns that pass for style. Not even Wilde's own appearance between acts, himself not far from his own come-uppance, can raise this Ideal above the ordinary.

-- Peter Keough