WILDE FUN : 'An Ideal Husband'.

Oscar Wilde's play, An Ideal Husband, premiered after his earlier successes, Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance-slick melodramas studded with epigrams but otherwise artistically nil-and was followed by The Importance of Being Earnest, a comic work so perfect that a century has done nothing to fray it. An Ideal Husband marks not only a chronological but a stylistic half-way point.

Here are two samples from Husband. In the first, the blackmailing Mrs. Cheveley, having exposed a youthful piece of shady dealing by the now respected politician, Sir Robert Chiltern, to the latter's wife, is being shown the door.

Chiltern: Go! Go at once. You have done your worst now.

Mrs. Cheveley: My worst? I have not yet finished with you, with either of you. I give you both till tomorrow at noon. If by then you don't do what I bid you to do, the whole world shall know the origin of Robert Chiltern.

Sheer claptrap, redolent of Windermere. But now, here is Chiltern's best friend, Lord Goring, sybarite supreme, and his man, Phipps, a butler whose imperturbability makes Jeeves look like Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Goring has just remarked that his boutonniere is too solemn.

Phipps: I will speak to the florist, my lord. She has had a loss in her family lately, which perhaps accounts for the lack of triviality your lordship complains of in the buttonhole.

Lord Goring: Extraordinary thing about the lower classes in England- they are always losing their relations.

Phipps: Yes, my lord! They are extremely fortunate in that respect. (Lord Goring turns around and looks at him. Phipps remains impassive.)

Sheer genius, including that final bit of business which is worthy of Jack Benny and Rochester. And every syllable looks forward to the world of Earnest.

Yes, melodramatic rubbish and comic scintillation are at large in this play, and it is to the credit of the adaptation's writer-director, Oliver Parker, that he has not only swept away most of the rubbish and kept much of the spark but he has also brought the melodrama and the comedy into easy coexistence with each other. If the movie script seldom touches the play's peaks, it is nevertheless more coherent.

Parker's method is to scissor a play into strips, trash most of them, and mount the rest prestissimo, often in settings the playwright never dreamt of, making free use of cinematic resources for the memories, dreams, and streams-of-consciousness of the characters. It's the traditional "opening up" of a play long practiced by Hollywood hands, but Parker carries it to more extreme lengths. His last job was a slice-and-dicing of Othello that turned that economical tragedy into a pusillanimous essay about nothing in particular. But to the less unified Ideal Husband, Parker has proved himself an adept play doctor. Fully half the dialogue in this movie is Parker's, and while not as brilliant as Wilde's best, the new stuff at least sounds as if it belongs in the same drama. And, as delivered by a sterling cast, Wilde's epigrams no longer stick out so much qua epigrams, but issue fairly naturally out of the normal flow of conversation, as if all these clever people were so overstocked with pearls that they were glad to cast a few away.

Nevertheless, I have mixed feelings about the abridgment. For instance, both of the excerpts above are pretty much eliminated. Good to have the egregious Cheveley toned down but what bliss it would have been to hear Rupert Everett and the great Peter Vaughan have a go at that bit about the florist. True, it doesn't advance the plot, but why do Oscar Wilde if you're interested only in plot?

But Parker has preserved the intellectual panorama of the play ("Mr. Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theater."-Bernard Shaw), even while making its mood swings less disturbing. This is Wilde-on-wheels: Zippy montages give us the British high society the Irish writer reveled in even as he outraged it-the political dinner parties, the balls, the "at homes," the parliamentary debates. Parker serves up what Wilde knew an ambitious person (like himself) could learn to love: society as sensual feast. And this provides the background to one of the play's most important questions: Do effective politicians without big, corrupting appetites actually exist? Oscar Wilde comes to post-Monica America.

On the page, Sir Robert Chiltern is a whiner and Lady Chiltern a prig, and perhaps the greatest triumph of the adaptation is that both characters engage the audience's sympathy. The easier task fell to Jeremy Northam-easier in what he had to play and easier for his particular talent, which is to make earnest men attractive. But Lady Chiltern is more than earnest, being so self-righteous that audience members might dash out of the theater to get away from her. Thanks to Parker's trims to the text and Cate Blanchett's acting, the character is not just tolerable but downright poignant. Blanchett makes us see that when Lady Chiltern learns of her husband's one ethical lapse, an entire world founded on admiration crumbles behind her eyes. Reading the pain on Blanchett's face, we can no more call her a prig than we would a child who has just seen her parents betray a trust.

Though Blanchett may give the best performance, it is Rupert Everett as Lord Goring and Julianne Moore as Mrs. Cheveley who are here the true stars, not because of their acting, but because of the way Parker has restructured and rewritten the script to place their characters at the center of the action. Everett is nifty; Moore courts monotony with her cat-who-swallowed-the-canary smile but gets by on sheer sexual magnetism.

Wilde intended his title to refer to the impossible image Lady Chiltern has of her husband; her emotional education is to learn that there is no such thing as an "ideal husband." But the movie version posits an ideal-husband-in-the-making: Lord Goring. Rich, witty, sexually magnetic, droll but tender, acidic yet compassionate, Goring is here given an additional emotional layer of vulnerability by Parker who designates him the one-time, rejected suitor of Lady Chiltern. So, when Goring bestirs himself on behalf of Lord Chiltern (trying to rescue both his career and marriage), Goring is saving the very man who once bested him in the game of love.

In the play, Goring manages the retrieval of an incriminating letter by simply blackmailing the blackmailer, but in the film the two play upon their very real feelings for each other. Mrs. Cheveley really wants this man, not just for his money but because he is her equal in wit and sexual assurance. Their mutual choice of weapon is seduction, not extortion. The camera is tight on the ex-lovers; we hear the nuances in their voices, the intermittencies of their breathing, and the guarded longing in their eyes. No shoulders gleam like Julianne Moore's (especially in cinematographer David Johnson's appreciative lighting), and Lord Goring would plainly like to sink his teeth into them. These two could make beautiful decadent music together were it not for the fact that it is part of Mrs. Cheveley's decadence not to be able to trust or to give, and it's on this inability that all possible reunion between the lovers founders. We are meant to think that, having transcended Mrs. Cheveley, Lord Goring is now ready for the true- hearted Mabel Chiltern (Sir Robert's sister) and that he will make her, if not an ideal husband, a damn fine one.

Almost I was persuaded. Trouble is, Everett and Moore look too good together. They are the most Wildean elements in this movie with their wit, facility for intrigue, sensual delectations, and amateur Nietzschean philosophy, and I can no more believe that Lord G. would rest content with honest Mabel after savoring the dangerous Mrs. C. than I could believe Oscar Wilde himself might ever have rested content in the bosom of his loving family after enjoying the dangers of "feasting with panthers."

Still, Oliver Parker has given us one of the most enjoyable movies of the year. Out of Wilde's too-abundant smorgasbord, Parker has served up a light, alfresco lunch, something perfect for a summer afternoon.