Film Reviews

A Good Woman

• Rating:
• Director: Mike Barker.
• Starring: Helen Hunt, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Umbers, Stephen Campbell Moore.
• Details: US-UK / 93 mins (PG).

When newly-wed Lady Windermere (Johansson) hears rumours that her husband Lord Windermere (Umbers) is dallying with the middle-aged 'notorious jezebel' Mrs Erlynne (Hunt), her perfect world is turned upside-down - but is everything really as sordid as it seems? Not content with updating the story of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan to 1930, and relocating it to Amalfi on the Italian coast, director Mike Barker also seems hell-bent on wrecking the simplistic but wonderfully symmetrical narrative movement of the original play; not only that, he yanks out most of Wilde's zingers and replaces them with clunking yuk-yuks that are delivered with all the precise timing of a wind-surfing giraffe. Hunt is horribly miscast as the supposedly seductive middle-aged Mrs Erlynne, and her pained expression throughout suggests that she's only too well aware of the fact; sulky-lipped Johansson, meanwhile, wanders through the story in a haze of naive ingenuity that would be hard to credit in a 12-year-old. In fact, of all the cast, only Tom Wilkinson, as the silly old upper-class duffer Tuppy who falls for Mrs Erlynne, acquits himself with any distinction. The cliff-top setting of Amalfi is beautiful and the costumes and parties are suitably glamorous, but A Good Woman is something of a crude coal grubbed out of an imperfect diamond.

Review by Declan Burke