Why bother to start from a Noel Coward comedy of manners - even if it isn't his very best - if all you're going to do is squeeze the wit from it and take it on a tightrope journey between soap opera and gilded tragedy without a safety net.
Of the dessicated remains we have a Brideshead-like estate into which the son-shine of his mother's hopes and dreams brings an American wife, a champion racing driver, slightly older and fuelled by joie-de-vivre. From this unlikely culture clash many secrets scamper like mice. They must be dealt with, either by crushing them underfoot or luring them away both literally and figuratively.
Australian director Stephen Elliot lacks the real elegance or any understanding of this 1920's tale needed to bring alive Coward's ambivalence about the era and the staining of the class system. He wasn't part of it but it fascinated him. He felt belittled by its arrogance yet was desperate to dance in its shadow. Of course in the end he was embraced by every class, but nothing was ever enough.
His stageplay Easy Virtue premiered in 1925, not as accomplished as the later Design for Living, but setting out some of the themes which consumed him as a dramatist.
The fact that any of them is still recognizable in Elliott's film is wholly due to some delicious performances. One is from Kristen Scott Thomas - who, as the disappointed matriarch of a family she feels is slipping away from her, can simultaneously combine serious and complex emotions with perfect comic timing. And Colin Firth, as the almost invisible pater familias, who knows how to sit very still and still convey the torment within. At the moments it actually erupts, nothing is predictable. His characterization totally embodies his class and experience, logically yet surprisingly.
Smaller parts and cameos from faces familiar on British telly are sublime.
Of the two leads Jessica Biehl has developed a fine line in hiding profound sadness beneath a brittle extroverted voo-dee-oh-doh of a dance through life. Her new toyboy hubby - though in real life she's only a year older - Ben [Prince Caspian] Barnes is outshone. A better script would have rendered them a flapper version of Beatrice and Benedict, wounding each other and those around them with the rapier of their wit. Instead we have melodrama interspersed with petulance. We have no idea why these two were ever attracted to each other since Elliott seems incapable of conjuring sexual chemistry between them. And there's certainly no level of shared intellect on which to build anything.
Given this is clearly a match made in purgatory, there should be some semblance of the possibility it just could work. But there's no heart there.
Which is what's wrong with the whole film. So, in the end, you just don't care about these people.
2 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First)
Salopian
Posted - 11/26/2008 : 13:19:10 Yup, a bit disappointing. Not a lot to add to the above. It just goes kinda flat.
ChocolateLady
Posted - 11/09/2008 : 08:57:03 How unfortunate that some great performaces are badly mixed with poor ones and a script that doesn't live up to the Coward name.
