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'A Good Woman' makes a not-so-good movie

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Let's say you're going to make a movie with Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson in it.

Which one would you cast as an irresistible seductress?

Well, director Mike Barker cast Hunt, which is a little like casting Josh Hartnett over Russell Crowe in a remake of "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Lions Gate Films

'A Good Woman'

B+

The verdict: More like a just OK woman.

Director: Mike Barker
Starring: Helen Hunt, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Campbell Moore, Mark Umbers
Run time: 93 minutes
Release date: Feb. 3, 2006
Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, sensuality and language.
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Official movie site

"A Good Woman," which also features Tom Wilkinson, is an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan." Along with the name change, the play's stiff late-19th-century London drawing rooms have been replaced by the sunny Amalfi coast of the 1930s. If you tire of the barrage of bon mots, you can always admire the Mediterranean scenery.

Hunt plays the scandalous Mrs. Erlynne, an American gold digger who preys on the wealthy husbands of other women. Fed up with finding a stray hairpin or a strange hair on their pillows, a phalanx of outraged wives drums her out of Manhattan. Unruffled, she moves on to the Italian Riviera, where assorted English aristocrats and moneyed American tycoons spend the summer.

Mrs. Erlynne zeroes in on young Robert Windermere (Mark Umbers), who's been married barely a year to Meg (Johansson), his beautiful, virtuous wife. When it becomes apparent he is paying huge sums of money to the older woman, tongues start to wag. And Meg lets herself be courted by noxious smoothie Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore).

After much intrigue, gossip and Wildean epigrams &151; many of them borrowed from his other works &151; all is revealed, including the meaning of the title.

Barker and screenwriter Howard Himelstein have pared down Wilde's play considerably, but since most of us don't know "Lady Windermere's Fan" chapter and verse, it doesn't really matter. What does is Hunt's wan, flat performance. There's virtually nothing seductive about her.

Johansson doesn't fare much better. She comes off as stilted, showing little of the finesse she brought to her role in "Match Point." And those simply aren't the lips of a naive ingenue.

Still, the movie has its pleasures. A stunning setting, clever dialogue, gorgeous period costumes by John Bloomfield (he did last year's "Being Julia") and a honey of a performance by Wilkinson as a practical man of great means who sees nothing wrong in being wanted for his money.

What's ironic is we're now seeing this movie that's been kicking around since 2004 not because of Hunt or Wilkinson, but very likely because of Johansson and the chance that she would get an Oscar nomination... which she didn't.