Tongue And Cheek In The Victorian Age-With The Film Adaptation Of Oscar Wilde’s Play “An Ideal Husband” In Mind (1999)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

An Ideal Husband, starring Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam, Minnie Driver, Cate Blanchett, Rupert Everett, 1999

Oscar Wilde certainly took a beating, a serious beating including some jail time in Reading Gaol which he wrote about, for his sexual preferences in late 19^th century Victorian England. Stuff that today would draw a yawn in most quarters but which then was scandalous. (As we all know not everybody is on board with the idea that you should be able to love whomever you want to love even in the 21^st century.) Moreover showing the sheer hypocrisy of the times Mr. Wilde took a beating for doing what a good portion, a greater portion than I would have thought, of the gentry and ruling class were doing themselves, especially coming out of the segregated by sex public schools (in America private schools). And nobody thought much about it except you had best stay in the closet-or else. A whole identification underground sub-culture grew up around that closet for both same-sex attraction cultures.

Before I get to the review of the film adaptation of Mr. Wilde’s ironic take on the courting rituals and expectations of late Victorian society among the straights, An Ideal Husband, in the interest of transparency I should note that growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid- 1970s I shared all the prejudices that were prevalent in my neighborhood on the question of sexual preference. That despite, and maybe because of, Cambridge a progressive center for gay and lesbian rights and life-style in the post-Stonewall riots world. I am ashamed to admit now that back then I had a boyfriend, a high school boyfriend, who with his buddies would go down to Provincetown, a historically friendly summer watering hole for gays and lesbians from elsewhere, for the sole purpose of taunting and beating up gay guys in back alleys. And, then, I thought nothing of it. Well, as Josh Breslin my old companion and current fellow writer here loved to say “you can learn some things in this wicked old world.”

On to the story now, the idea behind the sardonic appearances of the ideal husband when among the upper crust making a good marriage for every reason except maybe love was in order. One stem of this plot revolves around the role of women in late Victorian society. On the one hand Lady Chiltern, played by Cate Blanchett, is something of a suffragette, independent political factor and high end moral force on the other she is subordinately devoted to husband Sir Robert’s, played by Jeremy Northam, rising political career. On the one hand Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert’s sister, played by Minnie Driver, is a strong and determined independent young women and on the other she is fatally attracted to cad and gadabout Lord Goring, Sir Robert’s close friend, played by Rupert Everett. He, in turn is a committed gadabout but also a pillar of friendship to his friend Sir Robert when the deal goes down.

A second stem is the duplicity of politics and political power when a worldly and wary Mrs. Cheveley, played by Julianne Moore, enters the lists with a bogus proposition about governmental funding of another one of those can’t miss canal schemes which dotted later Victorian life as the British Empire reached it high side. To grease her skids she has damming evidence against the upstart Sir Robert whose original sin was that he had insider knowledge of deals going down and made the killing on the stock market that started his upward career march. Lastly this is also a send-up on class, on the strange mores of the upper crust, their mating rituals, and their willingness to bend with the breezes to keep their respective places. That attitude and an undertow by Wilde who would soon see just how that high society could be the frivolous existences that a goodly number of the upper crust lived.

Yes, Oscar Wilde knew what castles he was setting on fire with this look (and with The Importance Of Being Ernest), although he probably didn’t know that they would break him, that those works would be the high side of his literary output.