One of Oscar Wilde's most popular plays is given a new screen interpretation in this period comedy. In New York in the early '30s, Mrs. Erlynne (Helen Hunt) is a widow who lives comfortably through the largesse of several married men, and when she runs out of wealthy suitors in Manhattan, she decides to find greener pastures among the wealthy elite of Italy's Amalfi coast. Mrs. Erlynne sets her sights on Robert Windermere (Mark Umbers), a wealthy Englishman who is married to the young, innocent
and very beautiful Meg (Scarlett Johansson). Mrs. Erlynne gingerly tries to separate Robert from his wife and his money, fueling suspicions within Amalfi society as well as the audience that they are involved. Humiliated and ready to beat him at his own game, Meg begins to consider the advances of the handsome Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore), one of her husband's close friends. In the midst of all the attempted infidelity, the genially eccentric Tuppy (Tom Wilkinson) struggles to win Mrs. Erlynne's hand, while only one of the interconnected parties know that she carries a shocking secret. A Good Woman was based on Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, with its title drawn from that show's subtitle, "A Play About a Good Woman." ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
A Good Woman is such a dreary affair that it makes you wonder whether the last Wilde adaptation -- the critically lambasted The Importance of Being Earnest with Reese Witherspoon -- was really that bad after all.
A Good Woman won't ruin anyone's day, but it won't make anyone's either, and it won't get the great Irish playwright anything like the admiration his work deserves.
Sermonizes in the manner Wilde satirized; the movie bends over backwards to assure the audience that marriage and monogamy, the butt of jokes throughout, are just and right.
Hunt, grievously miscast as the worldly Mrs. Erlynne...ends up looking like a once-fresh teenager, beaten down by the years, playacting in Mommy's oversized threads on a rainy day.
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