The first movie in which I saw Rupert Everett was “Dance with a Stranger”, the tragic story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Everett played, to absolute perfection, the part of the caddish boyfriend who gets himself shot. After that, but for a few forgettable or miserable movies (Q: Who can forget “The Comfort of Strangers”? A: Both people who saw it.), and after an interview with Attitude magazine in which he outed himself, apparently before Queer Nation did, his career seemed to have tanked. The boy who had shown so much promise in his first movie, “Another Country”, was headed to another country than Hollywoodland.
But, of course, that is not what happened. Everett was excellent as the foppish Prince of Wales in “The Madness of King George”. Though playing the by-now stock character of Lovable Gay Friend in “My Best Friend’s Wedding”, he stole the show and re-established himself as a serious actor. And then he was the scheming Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: Everett’s bored shrug when the lovers offer undying affection to one another deserved an entire Oscar category.
And now comes “An Ideal Husband”, in which he plays the dissolute Lord Goring, Wilde’s stock stand-in for himself. Inevitably, he steals the movie. He does so against a cast of very accomplished actors struggling with one of Wilde’s heaviest plays, and despite a direction that does not quite know where to take the material: is this a morality play or a comedy of manners? Much good to be said, then, about Everett; about the movie, I am more ambivalent.
Here is the plot (as if that mattered in a Wilde play): Lord Chiltern (Northam), an up-and-coming parliamentarian widely respected for his upstanding morality and ethics, is being blackmailed for a youthful (unethical) indiscretion by a Mrs. Chevely (Julianne Moore). His wife, the lovely Lady Gertrude (Blanchet), is an unforgiving model of Victorian Morality who holds his esteemed husband to such high regard (“An Ideal Husband”) that her world “comes to an end” when she finds out, from the mischievous Mrs. Chevely (the pun, I am certain, was intended), about the source of Robert’s fortune. There are the usual comedic misunderstandings and clever lines (though far fewer than in other of Wilde’s plays), marriage proposals and, of course, grand balls and white ties …. I am not going to give too much away if I said it all ends happily.
Happily, more important, it ends. This is not one of Wilde’s strongest plays. There are no more than three good lines in the entire play – which, for Wilde, is a major failure. The play is not terribly funny; I counted three or four times that I laughed out-loud. And it has a Serious Undertone – made all the more serious by the direction, which appears to be fashioning a Social Commentary out of this yarn rather than a comedy of manners that, in principle, it ought to be. Indeed, one feels that Chiltern’s (Northam is superb) admonition at the end of the movie is aimed at us, the viewers at the end of this century, rather than at the audience of the last.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with trying to see the serious side of Wilde. After all, he was – or at least he thought himself to be – a dedicated Socialist. Many of his fables are, in their own quaint way, social commentaries about the conditions in which the poor lived (though he had little notion of it). In his plays, the comedy is always tempered by a serious sub-text, no doubt borne out of his homosexuality and the need to hide it. “You forget my dear, we live in the land of the hypocrite,” he wrote. It is a funny line, but it was a serious indictment of his society. It is all too easy to see “An Ideal Husband” in this light, to note that all the most upstanding characters turn out, in the end, to have feet of clay (and if you miss it, the lovely Gertrude spells it out for you) and that the only person left with any integrity is the dissolute and foppish Goring. In this context, and given that the play itself is unusually leaden, it is not strange that the director opted for some ambiguity in the movie: it is a comedy of manners, but there is Social Commentary in it as well. The director dispenses with the usual mannerisms of Wildean stage productions, and the knowing, almost winking asides, in favour of Whispers, Mood Scenes and Serious Acting. Why, even Everett plays down Goring; so much so that he is utterly believable, both in his dissolution and his later devotion for Miss Molly, Chiltern’s sister and ward.
And that says it all. Wilde’s characters are really caricatures and not drawn to be believable; they should not be acted as if they were. What is the harm, you ask? The problem with such an approach is clear in this movie: the play is manifestly at war with the direction. We are told Chiltern is an upstanding moral citizen, that Lady Chiltern is a woman unforgiving of sin, that Chevely is evil (more or less), etc. And yet, none of this is established; none of it is developed. In a Wildean play, where character means little and the aphorism everything, this would not be a problem. In a movie that appears to me at least to attempt to delve below the words, to search out and display the sub-text, character becomes everything and the movie/play’s lack of development kicks you in the shin every time there is a reference to Chiltern’s ethics or Chevely’s lack thereof. It is comic, and not a Social Commentary, that Chevely the blackmailer ends up, in the end, as the only one to keep her word of honour and not to have lied.
Go see the movie, by all means, but only for the acting and the sets. And look for the Wildean aphorisms that, though few and far in between, still tickle and titillate.