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Critics Consensus: This adaptation of Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan lacks bite due to liberties taken with the source material, coupled with uneven performances.
Critic Consensus: This adaptation of Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan lacks bite due to liberties taken with the source material, coupled with uneven performances.
All Critics (81) | Top Critics (30) | Fresh (30) | Rotten (51) | DVD (2)
... willfully odd movie ...
A wet teabag of a movie.
A Good Woman suffers from a staggeringly bad miscasting of its central role and from a cut-and-paste screenplay that substitutes random insertions of Wilde epigrams for character.
Something is wrong with A Good Woman: The lightning never strikes. It's never quite alive.
Wilde isn't supposed to be lovely, or charming. He's supposed to be funny, wicked, rude and as full of serious feeling as a lavender butterfly.
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.
Lifeless
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.
If you enjoy the charming wit of films such as An Ideal Husband or Enchanted April, you'll probably be Wilde about A Good Woman.
There's only one thing worse than being a period piece, and that's being an out-of-period piece.
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.
A bit of a muddle at the ending, but the performances are pleasant (Tom Wilkinson is outstanding) and the humour is quick and subversive.
A woman suspects her husband of infidelity when an older woman who has a sullied reputation comes to town. Why do modern directors and writers think they are smarter than some of the best writers in the English language? In this case, Oscar Wilde's great play Lady Windemere's Fan gets distorted, the worst sin coming in the third act of the film. In addition to alterations in the plot, writer Howard Himelstein interjects some of Wilde's random witticisms into the script; for example, there is little reason why America being the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between should be included in the film. It's funny, of course, but out of place. Helen Hunt does not deliver a strong performance. I often thought that Wilde's sophisticated dialogue puts Hunt out of her element, and Scarlett Johannson isn't much better. Obviously the Britons, Tom Wilkinson and Stephen Campbell Moore aren't similarly affected. Overall, the source material is strong, but the film isn't.
Super Reviewer
What a strange title... almost all the women pissed me off in this movie. I take that back; all the characters pissed me off. There is so much deceit, cheating, and dishonesty going about this plot that we, as the audience, don't know who to root for. There's a group that are the gossipers, Helen Hunt's the seductress, Scarlett Johansson wavers between loyalty and betrayal, and worst of all, Stephen Campbell Moore tries his hardest to break the bond of marriage to satiate his want to sleep with a hot girl. Yeah, you heard me; Campbell Moore says that he does it for the sake of "love" but I call it a booty call, and I make that assumption based on his annoying ass character's mannerisms and actions. What particularly annoyed me the most was how almost everyone within this movie was NOT genuine until the movie decides to wrap everything up with a happy, feel-good ending. "A Good Woman" is put together sloppily with very generic techniques that add nothing to the subpar plot with some of the most annoying side characters I've seen in a very long time. This movie is not worth a watch.
its an alright film
The tone of this adaptation is sooo serious and strips away much of Oscar Wilde's bombastic wit. Stephen Campbell Moore is my new It Guy.
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