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Review

Brimming with Wildean witticisms, now familiar bon mots, gorgeous costumes and first-rate acting, this adaptation of one of Oscar Wilde's supposedly lesser plays makes for a delightful film experience if you forgive the implausible plotline and the director’s unnecessarily lugubrious pacing. In a role he was born to play, Rupert Everett plays Lord Goring, a foppish young man dedicated to life’s pleasures - parties, drinking, clothing, beautiful women, bachelorhood and moneyed friends. His orderly world is complicated when his best friend MP Sir Robert Chiltern’s (Northam) political ambitions are put in peril when a conniving woman, Mrs. Cheyeley (Moore) blackmails him with an incriminating letter. Cate Blanchett is Sir Robert’s loving but staunchly conservative wife, Minnie Driver is delightful as Chiltern’s sister who has her eye on Goring and Moore is both beguiling and devilish as the woman bent on revenge and if she can’t have that, then Goring. What makes the film work is not the story line but Wilde’s writing still fresh and entertainingly biting as the day it was written.