Movies of the week
Political corruption lies behind the events in both Divorcing Jack and An Ideal Husband, the two most impressive movies to open this week, and both are from the British Isles. Apart from that, they couldn’t be more different.
Divorcing Jack is David Caffrey’s feature debut, and it’s a lunatically fine one. Making expert use of his pliable face and mobile limbs, David Thewlis plays Dan Starkey, a drink- sodden newspaper columnist covering Northern Ireland’s first independent election. He’s cruising sourly but gamely along, escorting an American colleague and baiting the leading candidate, while his love life complicates itself. It’s a slightly bitter comedy, so far. Then things turn very nasty indeed, and the movie goes into thriller mode with a sickening lurch.
Many movies try melding laughs and thrills; few have a comic heart as black as that of Divorcing Jack. And most gloss up their thrills into something resembling sleek Bonded aluminium, with a few explosions thrown on top. Divorcing Jack is explosive enough, certainly, but the oscillating funny-edgy, almost tragicomic tone sustained by Caffrey and scriptwriter (from his own novel) Colin Bateman makes the violence in the film deeply effective in dramatic terms. One feels and fears for the fallible Starkey as he is chucked into a nightmarish North by Northwest scenario, all but lost in a netherworld of crooked politicians and sadistic assassins, not to mention nuns with guns. By comparison, one’s sympathies for Cary Grant in the classic thriller of beleaguered bewilderment seem rather abstract.
Divorcing Jack makes a virtue of a sort of staggering but ever escalating momentum; by contrast, An Ideal Husband seems to slide along noiselessly, like silk on skin. The very complications of the plot – involving a blackmail attempt upon a rising politician – are as exquisitely seamless as the dialogue is witty and the mis en scne is opulent.
Adapting Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play, writer- director Oliver Parker has created a costume drama with a political edge, played by believable people who are more than just vehicles for Wilde’s glittering, brittle lines. The character of the dandyish wastrel Lord Arthur Goring (Rupert Everett) may seem the most rarified and stylised to today’s audiences, but he represents the aesthete, a real type in Wilde’s society – and one Wilde exemplified in his own person. Goring even wears a green carnation, though he does express some reservations about it. (The sudden appearance in the film of Wilde himself, taking a bow after a performance of one of his – later! – plays, and making a famous speech he’d made at an earlier opening night, is a mildly distracting oddity.)
Jeremy Northam as the compromised politician and Cate Blanchett as his upright, uptight wife both make nuanced human portraits out of their characters. Julianne Moore, a long way from her role in Cookie’s Fortune (in which, in a bizarre correspondence, she played an actress playing Wilde’s Salome), is credible as the scheming, changeable adventuress Mrs Cheveley. Most charmingly, perhaps, Minnie Driver does a lot to animate the lesser but still vital part of Mabel Chiltern; she’s as good as David Thewlis when it comes to getting the most from an expressively elastic face.