You might have missed the first adaptation of Easy Virtue, a play by the late Noel Coward. Back in 1928 it wasn’t a period piece, as it is now. It’s about a hundred years later than all of those Jane Austen adaptations, but this is the same kind of movie, aimed to appeal to the sort who like listening to well-crafted dialogue spoken by classy actors, watching the English gentry cope with their social inferiors (and money troubles), and imagining themselves living in impossibly large country estates. In this context, any American is a social inferior, and that is the predicament that the heroine (Jessica Biel)—a city girl and race-car driver, of all things—finds herself in when she marries. Her boyish husband’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas, in another fine role) is most dismissive, while her father-in-law, a rakish yet shell-shocked veteran (Colin Firth) is most sympathetic.
Director Stephan Elliott was last seen making the silly Ashley Judd-as-sympathetic-serial-killer drama Eye of the Beholder, but fares better outside Hollywood. He begins with a great sight gag, in which a sister’s dropped telescope falls smoothly into the arms of her father, who casually hands it off to his wife, who spies her son now arriving. Only a few scenes are that clever, but Elliot brings the characters into sharper focus as the plot winds forward, with a bit of suspense as to whether the American will stay with her husband in the country, move with him to London, or lost him to a romantic rival.
IMDB link
viewed 6/25/09 at Ritz 5; reviewed 7/6/09
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