At the Movies: Easy Virtue
“We settle down as man and wife
To solve the riddle called married life.
It’s de-lightful, it’s de-licious, it’s de-lovely.”
– Cole Porter
Well, married life isn’t all de-lovely. Not in 1929 when you’re the son of English aristocracy, you marry a car-racing “floozy” from Detroit after a continental fling and take her home to meet the family.
The problem is that the floozy, Larita (Jessica Biel, The Illusionist), has hidden depths, your mother is honour-bound to hate her, and the estate and the rest of the family are not what they first appear. Father, a sardonic, troubled survivor of The Great War, is still emotionally missing in action, your hopeless sisters are destined for spinsterhood, and the only people in your circle blessed by matrimony are patently married to the wrong partners. Larita’s attempts to improve matters only make everything worse. Consequences ensue. Skeletons rattle in cupboards. More appropriate lyrics, perhaps, by Noël Coward :
“There are bad times just around the corner
And the outlook’s absolutely vile.”
Easy Virtue might, I think, have made Noël Coward very happy. It’s adapted from his play, and the soundtrack pops with lively versions of the songs he penned with Cole Porter.
In fact, fans of quintessential British period fare are also likely to be happy and entertained by this offering from the iconic Ealing Studios. It’s Atonement without the angst, Gosford Park without the whodunnit, but you get the gist: visually impeccable, well-scripted, acted with proficiency and flair, credibly constructed around its chosen period, flamboyant and bubbly.
Coward’s works are enjoying a revival. He originally called the play “a melodrama”, and it has moments of depth and hints of darker things, rendering it less two-dimensional than it might have been. However, in the hands of director Stephan Elliot, the man behind Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, it’s vivacious, with some laugh-out-loud moments.
It’s just not cricket to film British upper-class movies without Colin Firth or Kristin Scott Thomas, so the casting director (industry doyenne Celestia Fox) secured them both. I often ramble about directors, but a movie’s success can hang on its casting director’s ability to perfectly match players with the material, and in this film genre, Fox must excel. No stranger to hierarchies of British class and culture, she was married to Robert, brother of Edward and James Fox of the British acting dynasty that includes Daniel Chatto, Joanna David, Emilia, Lydia and Laurence Fox, and which intermarried with both aristocracy (royalty, even) and the Richardson/Redgrave clan. When you’re casting a movie about an American bombshell who upsets the already dysfunctional family dynamics in an upper-crust stately home, familiarity brings a project extra credibility.
Scott Thomas was professionally destined to play the acidic class-bound mother-in-law, an aging composite of all the sharp-tongued, uncompromising aristocratic beauties she has built a career on playing, and she’s faultless. Colin Firth gets perhaps the most interesting role and will impress his fans. Established comedians (like Kris Marshall as the delightful butler) enliven the minor parts.
The biggest surprise, however, is American Jessica Biel, who holds her own with strength and grace against her high-powered, cross-Atlantic opposition. Some critics have denounced her performance as too modern. By my standards, in a role calling for the ability to be funny, sexy, smart, endearing, complex and sensitive, she delivers, and so does the movie’s ending. Another Coward lyric says it all:
“Nice clean fun,
And that’s the long and short of it.”
Maria Polglase
EASY VIRTUE (PG). Next screening
at The Village Theatre is on
Wednesday 29 July, 7.30pm.
