Impressive acting of Biel and Firth adds color to inconsistent 'Easy Virtue'

MOVIE REVIEW

Though "Easy Virtue" harbors the most appealing role Jessica Biel has had to date — which, frankly, isn't saying much — the real reason to bother with director Stephan Elliott's handsome but uneven film is that scowling old curmudgeon Colin Firth, an actor generally consigned to playing cold, unsmiling cads and bounders.

Here, he is by far the best drawn and most sympathetic of characters in an airless family of British aristocrats aghast to find an American suddenly in the fold.

Young John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) has returned to the clan's sprawling country estate to announce, without preamble, that he has married an American rally car driver from Detroit. Larita Huntington (Biel) is a self-possessed, adventurous and thoroughly modern woman, qualities her new mother-in-law Veronica Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas) regards with horror. It's bad enough that she's a Yank, and a widow, but her unfettered flamboyance is decidedly at odds with the kind of decorum demanded by Veronica, who was expecting her 20-something son to return home and marry within his class.

Veronica is a dour, manipulative pill of a creature, though it must be said that hers alone has been the responsibility (and the pressure) of maintaining the estate with fraying finances, drastically diminished staff, two hopeless daughters (Kimberley Nixon, Katherine Parkinson) and a husband, Col. Jim Whitaker (Firth) who couldn't care less. The colonel, a retired military officer still haunted by his experiences in World War I, has withdrawn to his workshop. Yet he alone shares his son's appreciation of Huntington's vibrance, the gust of fresh air she brings to a mausoleum of a mansion.

In short order, the battle between Huntington and Veronica is joined — all faux smiles and venom.

At this point, the film begins moving down a well-trod bride-vs.-mother-in-law path, but just when you think you know exactly what's coming, Elliott springs a surprise. The problem is that these revelations and twists aren't always convincing, and the movie goes from comic to tragi-comic to farce with little sense of cohesion.

That said, there is still much in "Easy Virtue" to admire. This is Elliott's first feature film in nine years, and a definite step up from the work he has done since 1994, when he made a brief splash with the overrated "The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert," whose commercial success he found difficult to repeat.

In terms of production design, "Easy Virtue" is very much of a piece with the best of British period television, which is high praise indeed. The work of art directors John Beard and Mark Scruton is richly detailed and impeccable, a perfect marriage with the costumes by Charlotte Walter and Martin Kenzie's excellent (if showy) photography. Yet the film's setting alone is so lushly bucolic, so gorgeously shot, you wish the whole movie took place outdoors.

Biel is fine in the leading role, demonstrating more range (and comic flair) than she has revealed heretofore, even in her better films like "The Illusionist." Scott Thomas has the largely thankless, one-note role of the scheming harridan, although the script by Elliott and Sheridan Jobbins, based on a lesser play by Noel Coward, goes to some pains to explain why she has come to this.

"Easy Virtue" at base, is about the tension between Old World protocol and New World freedom, a familiar theme for which Firth's character provides the connective tissue. It's a top notch performance, played mostly in the background, yet seeming to hover above it all. His world-weariness and impatience with mere form feel palpably real in a film that, at times, seems artificial and uncertain of what it wants to be.

Reach Bill Thompson at bthompson@postandcourier.com or 937-5707.