Easy Virtue - Surprisingly Bad

I was hanging out on facebook the other night when a friend posted: "need a good period drama? Go watch Easy Virtue! It's on Netflix."

Well, that was certainly enough for me ... I headed over. And I did watch, and I suppose I'm not too disappointed that I did, if for no other reason, then it gives me something to write about, but unfortunately what I have to say is that Easy Virtue is surprisingly bad.

Here is a film that by rights should be perfect for me. It has it all: British actors, great houses and landscapes; period costumes, cars, and furnishings! A great time period at the cusp of the 1930s! Hell, it even has Colin Firth.

How the heck did it still manage to be such a misfire?

What this experience (coupled with the recently painful viewing of Parade's End) has taught me is that good acting -- and other sundry visual delights -- cannot save bad writing. And that story matters above all.



Having just accused this work of bad writing, I was stunned to look it up and learn that the film was based on a Noel Coward play. Obviously enough I have not read that play. I learned also, thank you Wikipedia, that the play was adapted to film before -- in 1928 -- and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is getting crazy. I consider myself a silent film aficionado, yet I not only had not heard of the silent film version, but hadn't even realized that Hitchcock had been a director during the silent film era.

Feeling like a bone-head right now.

Maybe you should walk away slowly from this blog :)


OK, I might be uninformed about a lot of things. But I'll tell you what I'm not wrong about: Easy Virtue (2008) is not great. In defense of my opinion I'll also share that the Wikipedia article goes on to state that "hardly any feature of the original play remains [in the 2008 adaptation] besides the main characters, and even they do not greatly resemble Coward's cast." lol.

So maybe the Coward play was itself good. No idea. But this adaption is seriously flawed.


The plot goes something like this: Larita, a beautiful and vivacious American race car driving star meets and falls in love with a classy young British dude while in France at a car racing event. They marry and then return to England to meet his family. The basic plot from this point on is "fish out of water" stuff, with the young sexy American clashing predictably with the boy's mother and sisters, but winning over the male folk such as the butler and the dad, the ever-gorgeous Colin Firth.

The actors are top notch all around. In addition to Firth as dad, we have and Kristin Scott Thomas as mom; we have Kimberley Nixon and Katherine Parkinson (who I love so much in IT Crowd, but who is wasted here) as the sisters. I even recognized Kris Marshall as Furber the butler (who'd made such an amazing addition to Love Actually as Colin Frissel the guy who goes to Wisconsin to meet hot Americans). Was there a requirement that a certain portion of cast members have names beginning with K, I wonder?

The tone of the film is supposed to be light hearted and witty I think. But it just isn't. Music tells us that we are to find some scenes funny... like the burying of a dog who is accidentally squished. We seem to be expected to find the accidental squishing funny too. But these moments aren't funny and the cast can't make them so. Everything is written in a pallid and flat manner and with ambiguous direction.

There is no great chemistry between any of the characters; the closest is the connection that develops between Larita and her new father in law. The relationships between the other characters feel mostly strained and uninteresting - such as between Larita and her husband, the young husband and his sisters, the mom and dad, Larita and the butler; the list goes on. Although the engine driving the plot is the tension between Larita and her mother-in-law, their relationship feel so time-worn I just couldn't get in to it.

In fact, this is what plagues much of the film - a feeling of having seen this all before. Husband coming home to a world he no longer knows after the war...  Average looking girls overlooked in favor of flashy blonde... Girl next door with a heart of gold...  Yappy foo foo overindulged dog.... cliche, cliche and cliche! And that's when you realize that the English countryside can only take you so far. There has to be a point. Some reason to care about these folks and their predicaments.

Jessica Biel as Larita is gorgeous and I actually want to like her. Oddly even, I probably do like her character more than almost anyone else in the film, which is really saying something. Biel manages a  performance that fits this awkward film. But she got the memo that this isn't real English drama, just a knock off to turn some quick cash -- and her flat, charming, American gumption seems to fit that ethos really well.

Kristin Scott Thompson, on the other hand, is striving for something real and meaningful. But has little to work with and, despite her best attempts, the character of the mom (mother-in-law to Larita) ends up melodramatic, or just somehow too disproportionally deep for how stupid this film is. Though she is still such a treat to gaze at - what timeless beauty and class that woman has!

Colin Firth does his best to act the slightly curmudgeonly, wasted, but still debonair, older man. But we never get much sense of his motivations though, or any real backstory that could help flesh him out and let the viewer feel as if we know him. He just flits around the edges of the story seeming equal parts bitter, detached and classy. A too-strange mix. We can't really decide whether to like a guy who has so abdicated any role in his family -- when his family clearly needs some direction (...even though he is smoldering in a washed-up way, which, truly could be -- and often is -- enough.)

The young British actors, such as Ben Barnes as the husband, his sisters, and the butler, all seem to be working in the a middle ground of earnest, uptight, but still fun young brits and at times they almost manage to make the viewer care about them. The problem is we are given little to care about because their motivations are unclear or at least uneven. I don't really know what they want.

All in all, I would say that the film isn't horrid. It does have some amazing eye-candy in the form of gowns and period details that have been lovingly recreated. The cinematography is rich and evocative. If these things are enough for you, watch. I would not recommend it directly, but there are worse ways to spend an evening.