In 1930 New York City, femme fatale Mrs. Erlynne finds that she is no longer welcomed by either the high-ranking men she has seduced or the society wives she has betrayed.

Selling her jewelry, she buys passage on a liner bound for Amalfi, Italy, where she apparently sets her sights on newlywed Robert Windermere.

Robert's demure wife Meg remains oblivious to the stories about the two circulating throughout the town, but when she discovers her husband's cheque register with numerous stubs indicating payments to Erlynne, she suspects the worst.

Complications ensue when Lord Darlington professes his love for Meg and implores her to leave her supposedly wayward husband – an invitation she accepts.

[1] In his review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden called the film a "misbegotten Hollywood-minded screen adaptation" and added, "There is an excruciating divide between the film's British actors (led by Tom Wilkinson and Stephen Campbell Moore), who are comfortable delivering Wilde's aphorisms .

and its American marquee names, Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson, [who have] little connection to the English language as spoken in the high Wildean style.

"[3] Derek Elley of Variety stated, "In most respects, the film is so far from Wilde's play that it's practically a separate work.

Bathed in pastels, ochres, blacks, and golds, and easily moving around a variety of locations, it's like another slice of '30s nostalgia in the vein of Enchanted April or Where Angels Fear to Tread.

the process of literalizing the action, an inevitable consequence of moving a play to the screen, makes [it] less exaggerated and more somber than is ideal.

"[5] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "The film is well-intentioned and mildly diverting, but in attempting to modernize its story it has lost many of the things that make the original so memorable and not gained much in return .

"[6] In The Times, Wendy Ide observed, "There’s more life in Oscar Wilde’s long-dead corpse than there is in A Good Woman .