Ideal Husband Film Analysis

In translating a play into a movie, a filmmaker can easily lose sight of the fact that the essence of a great play resides in its language and not in a movie's ability to go on location or add cinematic frills. In opening up Oscar Wilde's 1895 comic masterpiece, ''The Importance of Being Earnest,'' the director Oliver Parker, whose more straightforward adaptation of Wilde's ''Ideal Husband'' three years ago found an agreeable balance between period lushness and linguistic precision, has gone overboard.
What would Wilde have made of the embellishments Mr. Parker has tacked onto the play like a reckless dressmaker tarting up a Chanel suit to resemble a Versace gown? Those additions include fantasy sequences, a ragtime band, a hot-air balloon and a horse-and-carriage traffic jam. An aggressively buoyant score (by Charlie Mole) washes through the movie, giving it a perky vo-dee-o-do flavor that feels more 1920's than 1890's. As much as possible, the play has been moved outdoors to intoxicate us with the rarefied air of an English country estate.
And what of the language in a work where the refinements and ambiguities of speech are everything?
Wilde's famous epigrams remain intact and are reasonably well spoken. But the extra visual accouterments have a profoundly distracting effect. They interrupt the rhythm and retard the momentum of brilliantly silly banter that could be described as incisive nonsense. When Lady Bracknell (Judi Dench), the play's ur-snob, declares, ''Ignorance is like a delicious exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone,'' she conjures a privileged, cucumber-sandwich world where a devotion to the superficial is a code of behavior and proof of social
superiority.
The genius of the play is the brilliance with which it simultaneously embodies and sabotages its concept. While celebrating brittle badinage as a comic art form and willful superficiality as the ultimate revenge on a cold cruel world, it makes its garrulous, dissembling aristocrats look ridiculous. Its twisty artificial plot, in which the characters' assiduously cultivated lies turn out to be true, and the putting of the concept of ''earnestness'' through the comic wringer support Wilde's contention that ''we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.''
Half a century ago, ''The Importance of Being Earnest'' was made into a classic, unabashedly stagy movie, directed by Anthony Asquith, with a cast led by Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell. It dispensed Wilde's apercus with a brittle insouciance that is largely missing from this souped-up version. If this film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles today and in other cities Friday, has a blue-ribbon cast that more than matches its forerunner in name value, it misses its high-toned elegance.
Rupert Everett, that pouty, spoiled princeling who exudes a Wildean hauteur tinged with a Wildean depravity, is Algernon Moncrieff, the debt-ridden charmer who spends half his life evading creditors by dashing off to the bedside of an imaginary friend. Colin Firth exudes a bogus stolidity as Algernon's friend and comic adversary, Jack Worthing, a foundling discovered in a handbag, who is now the legal guardian of Cecily Cardew (Reese Witherspoon), the dewy granddaughter of the man who adopted him. When visiting London, Jack plays his own charades, passing himself off as his own nonexistent brother, Ernest, to win the hand of Lady Bracknell's daughter, Gwendolen (Frances O'Connor), who is fixated on the name Ernest.
But Jack's obscure origins become an insurmountable obstacle. As Lady Bracknell famously puts it, ''You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter -- a girl brought up with the utmost care -- to marry into a cloakroom and form an alliance with a parcel.''
But the movie is so romantically insecure it inserts over-decorated fantasy sequences in which Cecily imagines Algernon as a knight in armor. Its biggest gaffe, which lasts barely a second, is a flashback revealing Lady Bracknell to have once been a music-hall floozy dandled on the lap of her future husband. As tantalizing as it may be, the suggestion that many of the world's grander dames have shady pasts simply doesn't belong here.