After director Oliver Parker's over-caffeinated assaults on Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and The Ideal Husband, Mike Barker's A Good Woman (based on Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan) comes as balm, at least visually. The lushness and eye for detail in A Good Woman almost make it feel like a Merchant Ivory production. Unfortunately, Barker's effort also, like much from the M&I factory, favors style over content.

"A Good Woman" appears as the subtitle to Lady Windermere's Fan, from 1892. It was his first West End hit, and quite unlike his subsequent plays. While a fund of Wildean wit, it remains a serious psychological drama, though skillfully gift-wrapped with a happy ending.

A middle-aged seductress, Mrs. Erlynne, enters the lives of a young married couple, Lord and Lady Windermere. It soon transpires that she and Lord Windermere have a private relationship, one in which he has a tendency of writing her checks for substantial amounts of money. Erlynne is a lady that ladies talk about, and the talk soon causes harm. The young Lady Windermere discovers evidence of his lordship's expenditures, and, naturally, believes the worst.

In a fit of hurt and pique, she runs away to the house of Lord Darlington, an ardent admirer, with the intent of leaving her husband and his infidelity. She is tracked down surprisingly by Mrs. Erlynne, who tries to convince her to go back to her husband before it's too late. What the headstrong young woman hasn't realized is that Mrs. Erlynne has been blackmailing Lord Windermere. He has been giving her a handsome allowance to keep her from telling the world an awful secret: She's Lady Windermere's mother.

It's a higher-class version of melodrama from the Stella Dallas school of secret mothers, but it works primarily because of Wilde's scintillating dialogue ("Her hair turned quite gold from grief"), portions of which have been kept in Howard Himelstein's adaptation, along with healthy borrowings from some of Wilde's other work, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Critic as Artist.

Barker has moved the piece to 1930, and has also shifted the action to Amalfi, Italy. Lord and Lady Windermere have also lost their British titles, becoming just run-of-the-mill American millionaires, Mr. and Mrs. Windermere (Mark Umbers and Scarlett Johansson). However, their circle remains quite British, titled and waspishly snobby ("America is the only country to have progressed from Barbarism to Decadence without Civilization in between.").

Arriving from the Decadence is the mysterious Mrs. Erlynne (Helen Hunt), who lives in some grandeur, even though news of her eviction from one of New York's finer hotels is a subject for clubroom chat. She quickly gains the superior ire of the English set, except for the wealthy Tuppy (Tom Wilkinson), who fancies a nice woman with a past.

That Johansson cannot act has been demonstrated in a number of films. She is beautiful in the way that porcelain would be were it animated, but every word that drips from her bee-stung lips sounds false, if not forced. One wonders what her career will look like after she's passed the sell-by date for naive ingénues. Sadly, with the exception of Wilkinson, the cast of A Good Woman seems to have been called from a Merchant Ivory warm-up bench of second-stringers. Wilkinson is excellent, but one wishes that he had the support of his fellow players.

The primary problem, however, is with the casting of Hunt as Mrs. Erlynne. Hunt is a wonderful comedic actress with the brittle irony of an Eve Arden. But like Arden, Hunt is really a good character actress, not someone who can carry an entire film. That aside, Hunt is simply wrong for the part, as she lacks the sensuality and voluptuousness that makes Mrs. Erlynne seem like such a scheming, vampish threat to everyone else. Hunt simply isn't siren material.