Wilde About My Baby-A Film Adaptation Of Oscar Wilde’s  An Ideal Husband  

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

 

An Ideal Husband, starring Rupert Everett, Cate Blanchett, Minnie Divers, Jeremy Northem, Julianne Moore, based on the play by Oscar Wilde, 1999  

In the recent past I have reviewed another film adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play. The Important Of Being Earnest, a hilarious sent-up of late Victorian attitudes toward marriage, especially marriage among the upper-set which more about property and settlements than romantic love. In the film adaptation under review of An Ideal Husband old Oscar takes another whack at the upper-crust and their skinny world. Of course all through this period dear sweet Oscar had his own then very private problems (his homosexual relationship) which that same upper-crust society who roared with special hypocrisy when he was on the rack. So one cannot help feeling that Wilde was skewering his own sort when he wrote this one.      

The plotline is as old as humankind, goes back to the old first family, upper crust or not, Adam and Eve, maybe before. See up and coming big government minister Chiltern, well-connected, well-married with a reasonably happy married life has a dark secret in the past, something that might drop him down into the cheap seats if it was found out. That kind of thing is easy prey to blackmail, money or favors take your pick. That straight line career to 10 Downing Street would surely get derailed if the word was passed. Here is the way the squeeze play worked though. This Mrs. Cheverly, a woman who knows the main change when she sees it has the secret that could undo Chiltern. Naturally the dear lady has a project dear to her heart that just needs a little push by Chiltern-that’s the blackmail hook. Of course as everybody over twelve knows, maybe younger, once the blackmail starts there is no end. Even Chiltern knows this. He figures though that with the help of his dear friend Lord Goring, normally seen as a loafer, but who knows the lady in question figured to get out from. From there it is a romp of misdeeds and miscues to the end. Yeah old Oscar knew how to send-up the upper crust of his time. Too bad they didn’t have better senses of humor when his turn came. Have a better sense of forgiving for past sins and for shipping his off to Reading Gaol rather them flocking to his witty plays.