Film: Wilde at Heart
An Ideal Husband takes as its starting point the sort of social scene that's not a million miles away from The Importance of Being Earnest. This is a connection that's stressed - if not rammed home - by Parker's background activity, as names like Bunbury and Windermere are dropped into conversation.
Rupert Everett's aristocratic layabout, Arthur Goring, would be at home in either setting, and the rest of the cast, with the exception of upstanding Chiltern political couple (Jeremy Northam and Cate Blanchett), inhabit the same world, divorced from anything of any real consequence. It takes the arrival of adventuress Mrs Cheveley (Julianne Moore) to introduce the elements of intrigue and scandal which reconnect their party milieu to a world in which the cost of a scheme gone wrong isn't a shame-faced social come-down, but the destruction of careers, marriages and friendships.
Sir Robert Chiltern appears to be the Golden Child of politics. Marked for high office, of seemingly unblemished character, he is matched in moral rectitude only by his wife, Gertrude, herself a staunch campaigner for women's votes. But Mrs Cheveley, her past inextricably linked with those of both the Chilterns, and of Goring, threatens to reveal his one dark secret, the source of his current wealth, unless he compromises his stand on the murky canal scheme in which she has invested.
On the verge of ruin, his career at stake and unable to appear to his wife as anything less than perfect, Chiltern can look to Goring, perhaps the wittiest and most pointless man on the social circuit. Behind a façade of nonchalant one-liners, Goring feels he should do the decent thing, and, although constantly hectored by his father and continuously be-simpered by Chiltern's younger sister Mabel (Minnie Driver), attempts to help. And it is only when Goring's well-meaning scheme misfires and things start going really badly wrong that An Ideal Husband gets into its stride. Parker brings home just how high the personal and political stakes are, as Mrs Cheveley's plotting atomises Chiltern's relationships.
Humour is certainly not absent from An Ideal Husband. Parker has balanced this perfectly, so that Everett's carelessly thrown-away comments don't bring scenes crashing to a stand-still, as he delivers one-lines with the suspicion that he's getting too old for this sort of cynicism. Driver acts as his main verbal sparring partner, but vacillates between the capable foil Everett really needs, and the gauche innocent she always resembles. But Parker understates this humour, placing it in the background as he makes the most of the real tension and need for tolerance to be found in the play.
Visually, Parker seems equally keen to downplay the period nature of the film. Occasionally he pulls back to provide an overview of the streets, the halls, or the park, but his concentration is on the details, the appointments of evening wear as one dresses or dances. And his approach works. An Ideal Husband becomes less stereotypically Wildean, less period drama-ish, and enables more empathy as it does so. This isn't a film to watch for the political satire, or the wit, which is all the adverts seem to mention. You should go and see An Ideal Husband because it's Wilde without handbag jokes, because the casting is excellent, because it's genuinely gripping, and because you'll enjoy it.
js go