There is very little to recommend this travesty of one of Noel Coward's less exciting plays. For one thing, it's another one of these period pieces that distorts the period in question with anachronistic music and dialogue and plot situations. 90% of Coward's brittle, subtle word play is excised and replaced wholesale by a mishmash of pseudo-Coward-ish repartee that falls flat more often than not; these substitutions are further embellished by bits of slapstick. The screenwriters even reach into Coward's offstage banter for lines like "If you had a neck, I'd wring it." EASY VIRTUE was one of those drawing room comedies in which stuffy old-fashioned people, remnants of the Victorian Age, were exposed by outsiders or upstarts in their midst as the vile hypocrites they were. This exposure took the form of verbal exchanges in spacious interiors, and in the case of EASY VIRTUE, of dramatically satisfying rants by the exasperated Larita, a middle-aged "woman with a past" who marries a callow youth from a traditional family. It was the age when old social mores (money and land marrying money and land, sexuality suppressed, etc.) were breaking under the pressure of that demon Progress, and hastened by that Leveller, War, and were being supplanted by a new morality, that of "easy virtue." In this film, these themes are shouted out at us, discussed in detail, dramatized with underscoring and exclamation, whereas in the original they were gurgling beneath the surface.
Here we get an American actress, Jessica Biel, as Larita, who in real life is YOUNGER than Ben Barnes, the actor who plays John Whittaker, the youth she marries! So the organic subtext of their relationship is thrown out from the start. And the pseudo-Cowardian dialogue turns to mush coming from her 21st century North American lips - it's like watching a high school performance. She is never convincing. Kristin Scott Thomas as the youth's calculating to- the-manor-born mother, Katherine Parkinson as the repressed elder daughter and Kimberley Nixon as the excitable younger one, and Ben Barnes serve their parts well enough. Colin Firth gives a strong performance as the father but the conception of his character seems weirdly out of synch with the 1920s, as crystallized in his dinner table remark that the American Thanksgiving holiday was like a commemoration of the genocide of the Native Americans - definitely not from Coward!
As if to compensate for the gutting of Coward's original dialogue, the filmmakers inject snippets of Coward's own songs either on the soundtrack, from Victrola records played by the characters or from the mouth of John Whittaker to his wife. It's a pathetic waste of time.
Here we get an American actress, Jessica Biel, as Larita, who in real life is YOUNGER than Ben Barnes, the actor who plays John Whittaker, the youth she marries! So the organic subtext of their relationship is thrown out from the start. And the pseudo-Cowardian dialogue turns to mush coming from her 21st century North American lips - it's like watching a high school performance. She is never convincing. Kristin Scott Thomas as the youth's calculating to- the-manor-born mother, Katherine Parkinson as the repressed elder daughter and Kimberley Nixon as the excitable younger one, and Ben Barnes serve their parts well enough. Colin Firth gives a strong performance as the father but the conception of his character seems weirdly out of synch with the 1920s, as crystallized in his dinner table remark that the American Thanksgiving holiday was like a commemoration of the genocide of the Native Americans - definitely not from Coward!
As if to compensate for the gutting of Coward's original dialogue, the filmmakers inject snippets of Coward's own songs either on the soundtrack, from Victrola records played by the characters or from the mouth of John Whittaker to his wife. It's a pathetic waste of time.