Stephan Elliott is not above using less than refined language to express his motivation for resurrecting British playwright Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue on celluloid.
“When we set out to make this film … the first thing I said to myself is, ‘If we shoot shit that’s straight, absolutely straight, we’re not gonna find an audience,'” Elliott (Eye of the Beholder) said in an interview with The Diamondback. “Coward actually wrote this play for 24-year-olds. He was 24. He was making it for a young crowd. So … we got to think about what we can do to bring this into a younger audience.”
The casting largely reflects this desire. Jessica Biel (I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry), perhaps one of Hollywood’s fastest rising female leads, plays Larita Whittaker, an American race car driver inadvertently thrust into the dynamics of an ages-old English family upon marrying its scion, John Whittaker (Ben Barnes, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian).
“I wanted something fresh; I wanted something young,” Elliot said of his casting choices. “No one expected Jessica to do this. I don’t know about you, but I think she’s one of the great surprises of the film.”
These fresh new faces, however, are pitted against veteran Brits Colin Firth (Genova) and Kristin Scott Thomas (I’ve Loved You So Long), who play Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker. In a Jazz Age screwball comedy such as Easy Virtue – filled to the brim with sly retorts and dry British humor – delivery is everything. A brilliant line on Elliott and co-screenwriter Sheridan Jobbins’ (Alex’s Party) page can be ruined rather rapidly by an inept reading.
Of course, Elliott had little to fear with the brilliantly sardonic Firth almost flaunting his near perfect timing.
“You’d wish for him, wouldn’t you, in that role?” Jobbins said simply of Firth fitting the part.
His brooding Mr. Whittaker, bearing the wounds of World War I and an airless marriage to the fiercely uptight Mrs. Whittaker, copes largely through chain smoking and delivering incisively witty rejoinders.
The dialogue displays the unmistakable fingerprints of a clever playwright, yet still remains grounded by Firth’s effortless weariness. When his wife wonders out loud what they would do with that “woman,” Firth sarcastically retorts, “hang her,” without missing a beat, getting to the absurd heart of Mrs. Whittaker’s reactionary terror to her daughter-in-law.
Biel, on the other hand, achieves mixed success as Larita. The role is never quite a complete fit, loosely falling over her at certain moments and matching her perfectly at others.
Take a slapstick gag in which Biel sits on and accidentally kills the family dog (fans of The Sopranos will feel slight deja vu). The comedy of errors never quite sets in and Biel’s embarrassment never really registers. Later, Biel coolly puffs on a cigarette after conspiring with the manor’s housekeeping staff to bury “the bitch.” Her callousness here is both amusing and true to the character.
This shortcoming is evident throughout the film. Biel proves time and time again she can do strong, with her toned physique and unabashedly physical air. Still, she cannot flip the switch, so to speak, and do weak.
Elliott relished capturing and playing off of this physical contrast between the fresh, vital Biel and the crumbling faces around her.
“We uglied her up: We put a bad wig on her and a terrible cardigan and made her look like shit,” Elliott said of Thomas’ makeup. “Jessica looked like the Chrysler Building. … There was a lot of tension going on. As a director, that’s my job half done.”
Firth handles his dramatic monologue about his ruinous, drug-fueled quest to discover why so many young men had to die during the war with searching eyes and a pensive demeanor. Biel’s climactic speech – about her equally troubled past dealing with a dying husband – drowns under the weight of Biel’s inexpressive, rosy visage and flat intonations.
Easy Virtue’s style is also somewhat puzzling. Elliott often begins and ends scenes with shots of his characters reflected on skewed mirrors or odd surfaces. He cites Alfred Hitchcock, who made his own silent version of the film in 1928, as an influence and wished to infuse the venture with some of the famed director’s style. While he evokes the mise en scene somewhat correctly, Elliott misses the undertones.
He relies on the narrative and symbolic actions, such as Larita’s decision to race a motorcycle in a fox hunt to express a desire to escape. A far more effective decision would have been to stop the zippy screwball tempo and really let the boredom and the stifling suffocation of the dusty manor sink in.
Of course, a younger audience would have little patience for such exploration, running contrary to Elliott’s overruling goals as a maker of entertainment.
“I want people to go and tell younger people,” Eilliott said. “I don’t want them to say, ‘I’m going to go home and tell my mum about this, she’ll love it.’… It’s too easy to say, ‘Oh, my grandma would love this.’ That’s not what I set out to do.”
vmain13@umd.edu
RATING: 3 out of 5 stars
