A Good Woman | Reviews

Publish date: 2024-06-17
Henry James thought Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan 'infantine [sic] in both subject and form'. He was wrong. It is a witty, mature and surprising comedy, and these qualities are brought out well in Mike Barker's Anglo-Italian film A Good Woman, which reverts to Wilde's original title and transposes the setting from late-Victorian London to Amalfi in the early Thirties.

Mrs Erlynne (Helen Hunt), the blackmailing fortysomething adventuress, becomes an American, as do Windermere (Mark Umbers), now a workaholic Wall Street banker, and his young wife (Scarlett Johansson). The wealthy English layabouts - worldly Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore), Lord Augustus Lorton (Tom Wilkinson), Cecil (Roger Hammond) and Dumby (John Standing) - retain their nationality and much of their epigrammatic dialogue.

This pared-down, good-looking picture occasionally is far more enjoyable than other recent Wilde adaptations. The performances, particularly those of Hunt, Wilkinson and Moore, are splendid, and John Bloomfield's costumes are as good as the Thirties numbers he ran up last year for Being Julia

The change of title moves the focus of the piece from a dramatic prop to the central moral ambiguity - is 'the good woman' the experienced Mrs Erlynne or the pure Meg Windermere? And what constitutes goodness?

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