[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img]The score, which includes some of playwright Sir Noel Coward’s own compositions as well as pieces from the Cole Porter songbook, is a rollicking jazz confection that swings through the film with all the carefree abandon of 1920s glamour. It’s the soundtrack (complete with an orchestra assembled specifically for the film) to the golden age of movie eras, itself an easy subject for the camera to fall in love with. And why not – the cars are all sex and sleek lines; the clothes are a heaven of fabric, shape and colour; and for the moneyed classes, at least, the bubbly never stops flowing. This is, naturally, just the sort of brassy veneer to suggest a tarnished under-layer. Beneath civility lies class-based snobbery and hypocrisy compounded by the eternal rivalry between city and country. “Easy Virtue,” on the surface, examines the collision of different worldviews. At its core, it exemplifies the damage wrought by a breakdown in empathy.
Into the viper’s nest of a wealthy British country family, then, comes Jessica Biel’s Larita, a sensational, head-turning, iron-jawed angel whose beauty, brains and free-spirited independence make her the uneasy object of envy and loathing among the Whittaker women in her young husband’s household. Larita’s proclivity for racing cars and her country of origin, the U.S., from the get-go don’t endear her to the family matriarch, who is so authoritatively and fearsomely played by Kristin Scott Thomas that whenever she smiles we fear for the strained muscles in her face. That the Whittaker family’s young son John was taken off his assumed path by a woman of apparently easy virtue, whose motives Mrs. Whittaker neither trusts nor ascribes to genuine love, is the fulcrum around which the film revolves. Ben Barnes, a strapping and charming lead, brings a kind of innocence and immaturity to the role of Larita’s husband, whose ignorance and naïveté sees him taffy-pulled between a marriage he may not be fully equipped to handle and his mother’s petty manipulations.
Larita’s spirited qualities, of course, are the very things that intrigue the Whittaker daughters, Hilda (Nixon) and Marion (Parkinson), whose vacillations between wanting to emulate Larita and bask in her worldliness while simultaneously yielding to pettiness to tear her down offer delicious morsels of complications. It’s a key dynamic, wonderfully performed and organically played out, that hinders Larita’s attempts to assimilate into an unwelcoming family.
Look Who Gets Together
Despite everything, however — the wry battle of wits, the hurtful clash of expectations – Larita makes a connection with Col. Whitaker, a war veteran whose broken spirit finds no healing in the tightly-wound Whittaker family and no interest in taking up the mantle of paterfamilias. Colin Firth, who is able to channel understated magnetism into great weariness and keep it all beneath a dry, sparkling wit, proves a quiet but effective and sardonic observer of the callous family politics. Along with Charlotte Riley’s refreshingly grounded Sarah – John’s childhood sweetheart who in a lesser story would have been rendered as a jealous harpy but is here the antidote to the cliché of “the other woman” – we are given sophisticated family politics. The revelation is that Larita’s virtue is not at all easy, but perhaps the most severe. In her we have a profoundly likeable and respectable protagonist who suffers and sacrifices but does so with steadfast dignity and wisdom.
Defying unquestionably easy reductionism, “Easy Virtue” is a comedy notwithstanding a heavy heart set on the injustices people inflict on one another. Stephen Elliot, the man who gave us the radiant Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, adapts and expands (along with co-writer Sheridan Jobbins) Noel Coward’s play with great sensitivity to the characters’ humanity. As director, he brings a visual panache that perfectly juxtaposes the light and breezy with the heady and bittersweet. The film’s style, much like how Larita’s gender disqualifies her win at a car race, puts a metaphorical emphasis on the uneasy relationship between appearance and substance. That we can laugh in the face of tragedy is what makes “Easy Virtue” so effective a portrait, in microcosm, of humanity.
Entertainment Value: ** (out of two)
Technical Quality: ** (out of two)
Gold star recommended!
Easy Virtue. Written by Stephen Elliot and Sheridan Jobbins, from the play by Noel Coward. Starring Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, Charlotte Riley, Kimberly Nixon and Katherine Parkinson. 93 minutes. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, brief partial nudity, and smoking throughout.
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