Trite, precious, rote, hackneyed, tired, terrible. I can't summon enough pejoratives to disparage this period-piece mess. First off, I didn't appreciate the obvious digital trickery employed to make this moderately budgeted production "handsome." Lots of mathematically blatant composites -- foreground too crisp, background too Gaussian-fuzzy -- and simulated crowd scenes. The whole film has this peculiar, hermetically sealed quality -- as if nothing contained within it has any causative relation to the world at large. Indeed, the forced drollery of the script made my eyes roll back into my head. It was painful to watch perfectly wonderful actors -- Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchette, Rupert Everett, Minnie Driver -- gesticulate their way through the wildly unfunny material, and even more painful to witness the usually insipid Jeremy Northam get way too much screen time. Pass.
Review of An Ideal Husband
