Oscar Wilde once remarked in a play review that “what is not conceived in delight by the actor can give no delight at all to others,” and this sentiment is illustrated only too well in Mike Barker’s new film, “A Good Woman,” in which none of the actors seem to be enjoying themselves.

The press materials of the film describe it as “a sophisticated ode to [Oscar] Wilde’s legendary wit and wisdom,” but “A Good Woman” is only a misguided, mawkish, and surprisingly humorless retelling of “Lady Windermere’s Fan.” Scarlett Johansson plays the owner of the eponymous fan and Helen Hunt is the world-weary woman with a past whose moral attributes are the subject of the film’s debate in this Wildeian remake.

As is the case in many of Wilde’s plays, “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is a wry and brilliant comedy of manners resting on what can only be considered a flimsy and melodramatic plot: blackmail, seduction, ruin, mistaken identity, noble self-sacrifice. Plot twists of this nature are the stuff of ancient Roman comedies and secondrate Victorian romances, but through the mordant alchemy of Wilde’s inimitable tone, the work transcends the banality of its storyline and becomes an utter delight. But if you invert this delicate balance and treat the action of the play as paramount and its style merely embellishment, the resulting production deteriorates into an insipid and laborious mess.

“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing,” Gwendolyne Fairfax says in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” While typical of his relish for mischievous pronouncements, this statement still sums up Wilde’s artistic philosophy, his rejection of overblown and facile sentimentality, and his gift for paradox. It was his particular genius to have happened upon a style – in his case, an epigrammatical brevity and an ironic wit – that was the perfect vehicle for his slyly profound observations on life.

Mr. Barker, despite throwing the quotation into his own film, has decided to pointedly ignore this brilliant and original dictum and instead chooses to construe “Lady Windermere’s Fan” as a story of moral redemption and the power of love, replacing wholesale Wilde’s brittle sophistication of feeling and insight with the worst kind of maudlin Hollywood sentimentality.

To sentimentalize Oscar Wilde is to misinterpret his artistic vision severely.To do so with a sweeping violin score, long, lingering glances of love and regret, and a couple of sunsets thrown in is almost criminal.

The actors are oppressed by the leaden earnestness that plagues the film, but in an ill-advised attempt to pad out the screenplay, Mr. Barker also forces them to plow through a se ries of epigrams seemingly plucked at random from Wilde’s extensive catalog. By the end of it all, this long recitation succeeds only in dulling the sparkling charm of Wilde’s bons mots.

The play has, however, been transposed with great success from the drawing rooms of London to an expatriate enclave on the Amalfi coast in the 1930s. Visually, the film is stunning. The locations are lush and perfectly appointed, and the clothes, cars, and interiors are glorious, a superb evocation of the glittering affluence of another era. The decision to depict the Windermeres as a pair of Americans abroad is another welcome, if rare, spark of wit in the film, adding an amusing slant to their prim and puritanical ways, while also sparing Ms. Johansson the indignity that befell the Southern-born Reese Witherspoon when she attempted to speak Wilde with a British accent, in a 2002 film version of “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

Ms. Hunt’s character, Mrs. Erlynne, also has been made an American citizen, though any naturalness that might be hoped for by allowing Ms. Hunt to speak with her native inflection is wasted. Ms. Hunt has adopted a high, flat monotone, a choice motivated, one imagines, to imply a sophisticated disaffectation, but unluckily instead sounds merely bored and adenoidal.

Mr. Barker would do well to review a prior version of “Lady Windermere’s Fan” directed in 1925 by the incomparable Ernst Lubitsch. A film of sly humor, high style, and deft sophistication, it remains a perfect distillation of the essence of Wilde’s wit and sentiment, and all the elegant contradictions therein: a graceful trick that he managed to accomplish without a single line of spoken dialogue. The triumph of that film and the failure of this one can be summarized with the usual felicitousness of the author himself in “The Critic as Artist”: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing and a great deal of it absolutely fatal.”