Helen Hunt on A Good Woman

What is a cynic?” Oscar Wilde questioned in his first stage play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” It’s a surprising answer (and question) from one of literature’s most cynical writers, one who valued wit over all else and who also wrote “a little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that A Good Woman—a loose adaptation of that first play—delivers a genuinely human story while displaying Wilde’s characteristic cleverness. “It’s true to Oscar Wilde—a fun look at class and gender,” says Helen Hunt, “and at the same time it has a real heart and soul.”

Hunt plays Mrs. Erlynne, a vampish older woman who sets high-society tongues wagging when she arrives on Italy’s Amalfi coast and is soon suspected of an affair with the much younger Robert Windermere (Mark Umbers). Meanwhile, Robert’s naive and virtuous wife Meg (Scarlett Johansson) fends off the continual advances of playboy Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore). Matters are further complicated when Meg guesses at her husband’s affair and Lord “Tuppy” Augustus (Tom Wilkinson) falls for Mrs. Erlynne.

The film’s title, and Wilde’s original, raises the question of just who the good woman is, the wholesome Meg or the wanton Mrs. Erlynne. As the story unfolds, we see the complexity of each central character and realize events and people frequently are not what they seem. “We’ve all got a couple of skeletons in the closet,” Tuppy says to Mrs. Erlynne. She responds, “If they’re going to rattle, they may as well dance.”

But such confidence masks profound hurt. “Some people—when they’re challenged—duck and some people keep their head high,” Hunt says. “Just by nature, she’s that kind of woman. But there’s also a certain overcompensating. ‘I’m going to have fun, and I’m going to look good, and I’m going to have sex with whoever I want to, and I’m going to enjoy every meal, and I’m fine and I’m fine and I’m fine.’ And there’s a bit of desperation in it, until she starts to look at the issue in her life that she’s never looked at.”

Mrs. Erlynne’s complexity is what drew Hunt to the role in the first place. “It has all the earmarks of a really good part,” the actress says. “I certainly saw in there the potential for a character I haven’t seen in a little while.”

Nonetheless, as one of three Americans in an otherwise British and Irish cast, Hunt’s getting the part caused a certain amount of consternation. But even though she was playing an American, she worked hard with a dialect coach. “I’ve done Shakespeare on the stage,” she explains. “That has a lot of the same requirements—attention to language and style, while not losing the immediate emotional authenticity. But as an American, we tend to be very flat and monotone, and very sloppy with the diction, and you just have to tighten it up a little bit.” Perhaps Hunt was aware of Wilde’s quip, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.”