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 19th 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 21st 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.
