To my mind, Oliver solved the problems of the plot resolution a lot more satisfactorily.’” He focused it.’ Cate Blanchett (Lady Gertrude Chiltern) agrees: ‘It’s sacrilege, but I prefer it to the stage play. Olly strengthened the characters and the relationships between the characters. The play feels at times like a vehicle primarily for all those wonderful quotes and wonderful dialogue. He’s given all the characters a real emotional journey.’ Producer Uri Fruchtmann agreed that in some respects Oliver had strengthened the story: ‘It may be blasphemous, but I believe that in many ways Olly’s adaptation is better structured than the original play. Producer Barnaby Thompson observed: ‘What he’s done really well is that he’s kept the Wildean world but at the same time given it a firmer emotional base. “ All the filmmakers were thrilled with the script from the very first draft. Producer Uri Fruchtmann recognized that the piece has an agelessness which would make it pertinent to the modern viewer despite the fact that it was written over 100 years ago: ‘I think all good plays are relevant because all good plays are about people. ‘I thought it had terrific contemporary connections’ says Director Oliver Parker. “ When asked why they thought Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband was a candidate for screen adaptation, the filmmakers all agreed: it seemed to have been written yesterday. The movie’s ad copy reeks of the same sort of duplicity of cheerful intentions as the patter designed to sell Shakespeare in Love and The Wings of the Dove, two other recent literary confections whipped up according to the matchless Miramax recipe: “There are as many publics as there are personalities.” But this was before test marketing and second-guessing turned the public into a single hypothetical infant yowling to be stroked and fed. “What is your feeling towards your audiences - towards the public?” Wilde was asked by a journalist shortly after An Ideal Husband opened at London’s Royal Theatre. In a way, that seems to be how we’re expected to attend to this play and its author–our focus skipping like a rock from one epigram to the next, while we take in the opulent, continually shifting scenery, the frequently changing formal attire, and the intermittent, delightfully incongruous bursts of Gypsy music, which makes the whole thing feel like a musical.Īpparently the filmmakers don’t entirely trust either the material or the audience, an attitude fully evident in the doublespeak of the press book - a sharp contrast to the rare confidence Wilde placed in both. In the movie Wilde the serious author is a bit like the cameo of him (Michael Culkin) offering a beaming curtain speech after one of his plays most of the characters are attending the play, but most of them aren’t paying much attention to the speech. Much of the four acts of An Ideal Husband, a serious comedy, is constructed out of flip one-liners, most of which remain, though Parker has added a few, all unworthy of the master (including one about the proverbial frying pan and the fire). This doesn’t mean that Parker should have adapted Wilde instead of Oscar. Wilde, the more serious author of the brilliant “The Critic as Artist,” an essay in the form of a dialogue, is never allowed to be much of anything. I don’t mean to imply that Oscar isn’t a witty and entertaining fellow indeed, he’s so much of one under Parker’s guidance that he’s never allowed to be anything else for long. In Connolly’s terms, it was a bit like going from Oscar to Oscar plus Wilde and then back to Oscar again. I’ve seen An Ideal Husband, writer-director Oliver Parker’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play, twice - once before reading the original and once after. The poor can think of nothing else.‘”Ĭonnolly goes on to explain, “ When I think of ‘Oscar,’ it is against a background of servants, of butlers announcing him and footmen with salvers, of a hansom cab hired by the day, the driver nodding under his tarpaulin while Wilde and Bosie display far into the night.” ‘There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. In some cases he is both: thus The Soul of Man Under Socialism in places seems almost inspired it is a breath of fresh air in which the idealistic aspects of Socialism (or Christian Democracy) have seldom been so well expressed - in his denunciation of private property for example. “ Wilde is Wilde in these essays and seldom ‘Oscar,'” Connolly noted with justifiable admiration. Reviewing a collection of Oscar Wilde’s critical writings almost 30 years ago, Cyril Connolly made a useful distinction between “Wilde” and “Oscar,” the two sides of the same man. With Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver, Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam, John Wood, Lindsay Duncan, Peter Vaughan, and Jeroen Krabbe.
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