Country house
calamity

Jessica Biel stars in the disastrous Noel
Coward adaptation Easy Virtue

NICE TRY: Biel

by MARK SLUTSKY

Give her credit for trying, at least. Jessica Biel, probably best known for her roles in all-American entertainments like the TV show 7th Heaven and movies like Stealth and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, would probably not be the first person you’d imagine going out for a lead in an adaptation of a Noel Coward play. And though, in the end, taking the lead in Easy Virtue is a gamble that most certainly does not pay off, at least she’s trying to do something a little more interesting than cheesecake.

It’s not all her fault, anyway. This is pretty much an all-around disaster, a movie that throws every trick it can find on the screen—wacky camera angles, whimsical songs, unwarranted nudity (not Biel’s)—but can still barely keep up with the source material. Director Stephan Elliott—best known for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert but whose last film, 10 years ago, was the terrible Montreal-shot thriller Eye of the Beholder—just can’t seem to figure out whether to treat Easy Virtue as genteel country house comedy, straight farce or poignant family tragedy.

Biel stars in this ’30s-set piece as an American race car driver, Larita, who marries into a stuffy British family: dull-witted John, her husband (Ben Barnes), spinster-ish sisters Hilda and Marion (Kimberley Nixon and Katherine Parkinson) and parents played by Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth. Arriving at the family’s generations-old country home, the newlyweds are greeted coldly by Thomas, whose snobbishness masks a genuine fear for the future of her brood, and more congenially by Firth, a war-scarred bohemian type. Over several weeks, Biel attempts to figure out her place in the unhappy and quickly-going-broke family, as they try to plot their own uncertain futures.

All I could think during this mess was how much I’d rather have been watching Robert Altman’s masterful Gosford Park, a film that recreated the English country house setting with so much more wit and élan. Compounding the film’s problems is a soundtrack consisting of old-timey-sounding covers of modern pop hits, which might sound fun on paper but in practice is pretty much the worst thing you can ever imagine hearing.

EASY VIRTUE OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JUNE 5