'A Good Woman' fails to transcend even barbarism

If you insist on taking an Oscar Wilde comedy out of its natural habitat, the drawing room, please don't take it any farther than the adjoining climate-controlled hothouse where the carnivorous plants are waiting to be fed.

Don't even think of carrying it out of the country or of bringing it up to date. Wilde's twittering, hyperarticulate snobs swapping elegant bons mots belong to only one time, one place and one setting: the luxurious inner sanctums of upper-crust London in the late-late 19th century.

Alas, those cautions haven't prevented the director Mike Barker and the screenwriter Howard Himelstein from dragging Lady Windermere's Fan, the 1892 comedy that catapulted Wilde to glory, out of the house for a rugged seaside vacation on the Italian coast. Retitled A Good Woman and updated to 1930, this misbegotten Hollywood-minded screen adaptation turns three of the play's British characters into Americans abroad.

Why the Italian coast? It's scenic. And who would deny the universal benefits of fresh air, sunshine and exercise?

Wilde would. No champion of the great outdoors, the playwright remarked, "At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets."

A Good Woman teems with like-minded epigrams, many well known, and many more shoehorned in from other Wilde plays: "History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality." "I can resist everything except temptation." "Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about." "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."

To hear these and other well-turned phrases strewn through the screenplay like shards of cut glass nestled in a haystack, you must listen closely. To coexist comfortably with the prosaic dialogue surrounding them, their cutting edges have been blunted, the hauteur of their delivery subdued. When put into the mouths of American actors with no feel for Wilde's high-toned repartee, they simply hang in the air and die.

There is an excruciating divide between the film's British actors (led by Tom Wilkinson and Stephen Campbell Moore), who are comfortable delivering Wilde's aphorisms (Moore gets the most), and its American marquee names, Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson. Those two stars' shrill, toneless performances bring to mind one of the play's most famous (and prescient) epigrams: "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

Hunt and Johansson have so little connection to the English language as spoken in the high Wildean style that you actually wonder if America's connection to Wilde's ideal of civilization as a refined, superliterate verbal testing ground is out of our reach. It wasn't always so.

Hunt, an actress who can win your heart when she plays it folksy, commonsensical and all-American, is disastrously miscast as Erlynne, an American femme fatale cutting a dangerous swath. Her eyes narrowed to slits, her gait gawky, her nervous piping voice pitched on the edge of hysteria, the actress seems so uncomfortable in her skin that you want to flee her presence.

An adventuress left penniless and driven out of New York by her lovers' angry wives, Erlynne descends on the Italian coast hellbent on what appears to be a new gold-digging expedition. No sooner has she arrived than she sets her sights on Robert Windermere (Mark Umbers), a young American businessman recently married to the luscious Rhode Island-born Meg (Johansson). Immediately, tongues wag. But appearances deceive.