Easy Virtue (PG)

12:04pm Thursday 6th November 2008

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IT HAS been 80 years since Alfred Hitchcock’s silent filmic treatment of Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue, so one could argue that the material is long overdue another shot at big screen success.

The task has been taken on by Australian director Stephan Elliott, who made his name with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – the musical version of which will soon hit London’s West End – and who was forced to temporarily retire from the movie business after he broke his back, pelvis and legs in a skiing accident.

Easy Virtue is his first film as a director since 1999, and he’s also co-written the adaptation of the play. There are a few additions to the plot, which is, at its core, still the tale of a liberated outsider’s experience of the English upper classes.

American Jessica Biel plays the feisty leading lady, American Larita - appropriately enough – who, courtesy of a courtship of which we see almost nothing, marries John Whittaker (Prince Caspian’s Ben Barnes).

Things crank into action when he brings her back to the family pile to meet the rest of the family - his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), father (Colin Firth) and two naïve and rather socially gauche sisters, Hilda and Marion. There’s also the matter of the family friend Sarah (Charlotte Riley), the girl everyone always expected John to end up with.

And let’s not forget “Mr BT” Kris Marshall as the omnipresent butler, who manages to steal many scenes courtesy of his often bizarre – and not at all period – behaviour. Despite John’s infatuation, his family refuses to embrace this union, especially when details of Larita’s past emerge.

The only sympathetic ear seems to be provided by Firth’s disillusioned head of the house, who we discover went AWOL for a while in foreign climes, and who prefers to spend most of his time hiding in the shed and avoiding his wife and children.

A well-cast Scott Thomas and Biel do a fantastic job communicating the aforementioned froideur, and no one is more capable than the former of playing a buttoned-up ice maiden. Kimberley Nixon and Katherine Parkinson also do terrific work as the Whittaker sisters, giving us beautiful histrionics whenever the script requires them.

Elliott has obviously aimed for a unique treatment of the material, fusing the play’s wit with a modern sensibility, and what could be interpreted as an appropriate lack of reverence too.

While we can admire his chutzpah, admire the on-location filming and delight in the moments when characters burst into song, proceedings still don’t bubble and fizz quite as much as they should. It was a big mistake to tack on a stupid plot about an accidental canine death – how many more times must we endure this in films? – and Firth’s character is more annoying than enigmatic, making him a little hard to care about.

Strange 1920s versions of modern songs like Sex Bomb and Car Wash work better, though, meshing well with the more traditional numbers, Cole Porter’s Let’s Misbehave et al, for the lovely soundtrack, to which both Barnes and Biel impressively contribute.