3 of 5 stars
Don't be fooled by the opening credits of ""Easy Virtue."" The cheesy animation passes it off for a BBC television special" with all the prissy Brits fretting woefully over silverware placement.
But director Stephan Elliott trumps up the illusion only to smash it to bits. This movie isn't so much Jane Austen and Masterpiece Theatre as it is F. Scott Fitzgerald with a dash of Flying Circus for good laughing measure.
The stage is England at the end of the Roaring Twenties. Jessica Biel is cast as Larita a race car driver a widow and (gasp) a Yankee with the gall to marry her youthful British lover-boy John Whittaker (Ben Barnes). It turns out however that this lover-boy is a derelict aristocrat with a manipulative mother (Kristen Scott Thomas) and a faraway shell-shocked vet of a father (Colin Firth).
As John brings Larita home to meet the in-laws his parents and sisters (and butlers and cooks and gentry neighbors" etc.) are all dazzled at first by her beauty and then alternately shocked or endeared by her ""easy virtue.""
The ensuing conflicts of spirit are rather predictable" whether between Redcoat and Yankee Tory and Whig Victorian and Modernist or country gentry and city slicker but the effect is still appreciable.
In the end Elliott has tied together all the complex threads of a troubled family. They seem charming at first in that way that Brits are always good for a diverting patronizing laugh" but they are all masking lifetimes of utter disappointment.
It's a useful coincidence that Scott Thomas stars in ""Easy Virtue"" because it can be compared with her other astounding role in the recent French film I've Loved You So Long.""
That film"" along with ""Rachel Getting Married"" and a few others"" was part of a recent crop of dramas concerned with the reintegration of siblings into troubled families. ""Easy Virtue"" the comparison reveals, is not nearly as significant a human exploration as its peers. Despite above-average performances by Scott Thomas and Firth, its stock characters and its plain old silliness drag it down.
But, thankfully, it's also the silliness that saves the movie. Without it, the melancholy love story that tries to be the center of attention would come off as flatly conceited. This is one movie where it's imperative to ignore the story for the genre.
For Easy Virtue"" this means ditching the heartbreak for the comedy of manners. The movie's real backbone is its high-quality" dead-pan British humor and its greatest treat is actor Kris Marshall who plays a hilarious" stone-cold butler named Furber.
While the ""serious"" actors wrestle with the implications of poison gas and pornographic Modernist literature" Furber presides over a house staff that functions like a slightly more sober version of Monty Python.
The best antidote to British drama apparently is British comedy" and ""Easy Virtue"" makes this clear as the manor-house crystal.
Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
