An Ideal Husband, 1999

An Ideal Husband, 1999
Director: Oliver Parker
Cast: Julianne Moore, Rupert Everett, Peter Vaughan



Stage: Home TV selection


An Ideal Husband in short: Sir Robert Chiltern is a successful Government minister, well-off and with a loving wife. All this is threatened when Mrs Cheveley appears in London with damning evidence of a past misdeed. Sir Robert turns for help to his friend Lord Goring, an apparently idle philanderer and the despair of his father. Goring knows the lady of old, and, for him, takes the whole thing pretty seriously.


Preps: none in perticular. Don't know the piece, but I don't have any other idea what to watch that perticular evening.



Reality: One of the movies that should be labeled as a TV movie. Because it's nothing more. It plays a big movie's game, but loses big time. The storyline is a good one. Betrayal. When you think everything is fine and dandy, something comes up to ruin your day and leave everything burning behind. In this perticular case, we have a happy setting of a couple, where both have a distinguished position in society, plus they seem really to be happy with each other, love themselves in the right way.
Now, what the real fuss is around - the devastation a lie about the past can cause. The husband seems to have a dirty secret from the past, which he failed to tell to his pure wife (in this sense I mean puritan wife). What to do now? Even though she's a bit suspicious, he doesn't take the path of confession, but rather the path of hiding his truth behind a lie. So it gets complicated. The woman who seems to know everything and threathens to reveal everything, become his greatest enemy and companion - he doesn't want to lose sight of her. She intimidates everything he knows, the certainty, the safety, the love he posesses and might lose.

After her appearance in his house and revealing the truth to his wife, things become even more interesting, because a chain of events is out of leash, getting things done in an extreme fast way. Although, you first can say everything will go down the drain and you can be righteous to say he should have spoken the truth at least when the wife asked him, the turnover is amazing at the end.
Now, the movie itself can be tagged as a TV series part - it seems like Mrs Maple, or Agatha Christie type of series, rather than a serious movie. If you see it as a TV spot, ok, then it's one of the better ones. But if you are trying to search for a true movie, you might be dissappointed. A story from british parliament, betrayal...seems luring, but the delivery is really bad and the scenes are far from perfect. Also the dialogues, the scenery, music, photography, costumes.. it's all really watchable, if you aren't expecting too much and if you need to put your mind at ease. But nothing more.


My personal rating: 4,0 (you won't miss a thing if you miss this one. Some amusing debates, but nothing more. What is Julianne Moore doing in such a piece, leaves restless in my mind. She can do so much more.. )


An Ideal Husband on IMDB