A Good Woman (2005)

It's possible that a movie doesn't have to be good if it has Scarlett Johansson prancing coquettishly in beautiful and revealing dresses. For the sake of A Good Woman, let's hope it doesn't. Mike Barker's 2004 adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windmere's Fan is beautiful to look at, but it falls short where any actual content is concerned. The breathtaking setting in Italy's Amalfi coast, the lush 1930s art direction and costumes, the aforementioned Johansson and the Greek-statue-like Mark Umbers are all great eye candy -- the only trouble arises when the actors open their mouths. It seems like any screenwriter adapting Wilde would thank their lucky stars for the deliciously wicked hilarity already present in the playwright's biting dialogue, but for reasons unknown, A Good Woman finds itself the victim of a crippling rewrite. The awkwardly penned screenplay undermines the trademark wit that communicates Wilde's criticisms so delightfully, and as a result the film's message comes across as moralizing and preachy: the complete opposite of Wilde's style. Helen Hunt is provided with the most unbutchered dialogue in the script as aging professional-mistress Stella Erlynne, but she takes the words all but completely for granted with a totally flat delivery. Johansson's performance as doe-eyed newlywed Meg Windmere proves she's still able to play a beautiful and naïve moppet, despite her title as Hollywood's reigning sexpot, but without any semblance of Wilde's original viciousness in the surrounding characters, she's a foil for nothing. And while it's bad enough that the film expects us to believe that Hunt and Johansson could be related, it's downright impossible to accept the idea that the husband of the latter would be cheating on her with the former. The only actor who really shines in the film is the ever dependable Tom Wilkinson, who brings incredible sincerity to his role as Tuppy, the rich widower with both the care-worn wisdom and enduring optimism to accept Stella's past and offer her a future. The transplantation of the story from the gossipy parlors of London to the bourgeois Mediterranean coast may have been an attempt to point the story's ire at a different area of societal hypocrisy -- it may also have been, as it appears, completely pointless -- but regardless, it provided nothing but obstacles for an already disadvantaged film to trip over. ~ Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide