Easy Virtue (PG)

4:22pm Thursday 6th November 2008

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Stars: Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Kristen Scott Thomas, Ben Barnes, Kris Marshall, Kimberley Nixon, Katherine Parkinson
Running time: 97 mins
Rating: ★★★★

THE Noel Coward play on which this film is based was a melodrama, first filmed as a silent movie in 1924 by Alfred Hitchcock. Director and co-writer Stephan Elliott’s Easy Virtue is a 1920s-set romantic comedy with songs that aims to entertain by sweeping us into the lives of the Whittaker family as their country house is invaded by a glamorous American woman who races cars.

Larita (Jessica Biel) is brought home to meet the family by young Englishman John Whittaker (Ben Barnes, fresh from playing Prince Caspian in the second Narnia movie) after they’ve married abroad.

Not only is Larita, with her posh clothes and penchant for smoking, a fish out of water in the English countryside, but she has to negotiate the black looks and sarcastic comments aimed at her by new mother-in-law Veronica (Kristin Scott Thomas).

John’s father (Colin Firth) is more laid back, horizontal almost – a result of his experiences in the First World War and a wife whose demands are too tiresome to bother about.

They have a couple of daughters (Katherine Parkinson and Kimberley Nixon) who are at first outraged and then entranced by the American newcomer with her modern manners.

Elliott brings a similar joyous feel to this picture as he did to his best-known film, Aussie drag queen romp The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.

He peppers the action with songs of the period, with a few anachronistic tunes – Car Wash and Sex Bomb, anyone? – thrown in for good measure.

Amazingly, this apparently mad mix works wonderfully well. Easy Virtue is fun, pure and simple.

The presence of Scott Thomas and Firth (underplaying beautifully as the traumatised father) ensures that the story isn’t pure fluff.

Barnes makes the perfect hero, although it’s Biel who surprises most of all, proving that she’s more than just a pretty face as she turns in a marvellous, darling, performance as the American plunged into the mysteries of British society and pitted against the mother-in-law from hell.