ShareThisStephan Elliott's "Easy Virtue," out this week on DVD (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $28.95/$39.95 Blu-ray), rated PG-13), has a lot going for it: It's based on an early Noel Coward play from the mid-1920s and it's filled with the witty repartee for which Coward was famous.
It stars Jessica Biel at her glamorous best -- looking like a (prettier) Jean Harlow, crooning like a chanteuse and dancing like a star.
"Virtue's" cast features some top-shelf British actors, including Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth and Ben Barnes (who starred in "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian").
Filled with terrific songs from the era by Cole Porter and Coward himself, the film marks a spirited return to work by Elliott. The Australian director became internationally famous with his 1994 comedy, "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," but hadn't made a film in nearly a decade during which he had a near-fatal skiing accident.
A clash-of-cultures comedy set in 1928, "Easy Virtue" begins with John Whittaker (Barnes), the scion of an aristocratic English family, eloping with a thoroughly modern divorcee named Larita (Biel). They return to his ancestral country estate, where Larita attempts to ingratiate herself with John's stern and disapproving mother (Scott Thomas, deglamorized in an awful wig), two sisters and dissolute father (Firth). She really has no chance of succeeding.
Mrs. Whittaker's hostility towards Larita comes easily and caustically. How could her son have married someone so obviously beneath his station: A racecar driver! A feminist who smokes! A floozy who wears suggestive gowns! An obvious gold-digger! And, perhaps worst, an American! It's hate at first sight for Mrs. Whittaker, whose hostility towards her new daughter-in-law takes the form of frozen smiles, denigrating comments and the diabolical placement of flowers and plants around the hyper-allergic Larita.
When Mrs. Whittaker learns lurid details about Larita's past, her hostility becomes even more explicit. Larita soon begins to respond in kind, with her young husband caught in the middle. Her only ally is Mr. Whittaker, a gracious man who has retreated into booze and his mechanic's shop after returning from World War I, where he lost in battle all of the men in his command.
The problem with "Easy Virtue" is that director and co-screenwriter Elliott overdoes many of the film's attributes. He states on his DVD commentary (with co-writer Sheridan Jobbins) that because "period films bore me to tears," he tried to "modernize" his movie. He retains some of Coward's best zingers but adds humor that is more scatological, more outrageous (including the type of anti-canine humor we've seen in "There's Something About Mary") and more farcical. This sort of comedy may indeed be "modern," but it's not particularly funny, or appropriate.
Elliott also gets carried away with the music, asking cast members to sing period tunes. Although Biel and Barnes reveal fine voices, Elliott persists in having Barnes' character repeatedly break into song to express himself -- and the device quickly grows tiresome.
While Biel gives a fine performance, she's miscast as Larita. In Coward's play, Larita is considerably older than her young husband, which makes the hostility of John's mother towards her more understandable. Biel is actually a little bit younger than Barnes, and while she portrays a character more worldly and mature than John, the lack of an age gap between the actors undermines the story.
Perhaps Elliott's most annoying directorial decision is to fill his movie with special effects, show-offy camera angles and other gimmicks. In this regard, Elliott may be trying to pay homage to the filmmaker who directed the only previous version of "Easy Virtue" -- the immortal Alfred Hitchcock. The great British director was 28 in 1927, when he decided, somewhat oddly, to make a silent movie based on Coward's dialogue-filled play. Hitchcock added a whole back story to Larita's life, beginning with the court trial that left her with a scandalous reputation. The movie nearly reaches the halfway point by the time Larita and John arrive at the Whittaker's mansion.
My guess is that Elliott was struck by Hitchcock's visually arresting funny business, involving such objects as a judge's monocle and a swinging clock pendulum. So Elliott fills his film with arty closeups of cigarette butts and taxidermized animals and with trick shots such as the reflection of a scowling Mrs. Whittaker off a shiny black billiard ball. Cumulatively, they make the film seem too self-conscious, to the detriment of Elliott's storytelling.
Still, Elliott's "Easy Virtue" remains an often-amusing look at the impact of one parvenu American on a declining English aristocratic family in the era between the world wars. Its social satire still packs considerable bite, despite Elliott's over-indulgent touch.
"Easy Virtue"
2 and one-half stars
Cast: Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, Kimberley Nixon, Katherine Parkinson and Kris Marshall
Director: Stephan Elliott
Writers: Elliott and Sheridan Jobbins (based on a play by Noel Coward) Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Rated: PG-13
E-mail Bruce Dancis at brucedancis(at)comcast.net.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service www.scrippsnews.com)
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