More than any question accompanying the release of Stephan Elliott's new film Easy Virtue, all anyone wants to know is: Can Jessica Biel actually pull off Noel Coward? The answer is "maybe": Maybe if her director wasn't preoccupied with his own performance. Maybe if she didn't have to square off against co-stars as formidable as Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth. Maybe if it didn't feel like everyone involved was seemingly making different movies. Maybe if she was a believable blonde. Maybe a lot of things, really, though none of these are the real reason Easy Virtue flails.
In fact, the legendary Coward isn't such an innocent here himself, having taken on this class- and culture-war comedy in 1924 at the tender age of 23. Precocious as his reads on love and familiy are, a few of his uglier thematic faceplants take Biel and pretty much everyone else down with him. (Elliott is a special case, a director who loves to watch himself think, but we'll get to that.) Biel plays Larita, a glam American widow and Grand Prix driver who impetuously marries John Whittaker (Ben Barnes), a finish-line suitor, one weekend in Paris. They return to his family's sprawling, entropic estate in the English countryside, where the senior Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker (Firth and Thomas) and their daughters idly watch their legacies -- and the accompanying cash -- fade as the '20s roar around them.
Thus consumed by her diminishing stature, Mrs. Whittaker has less use than ever for the bohemian Larita. John's puppy love persists, however, enabled by Firth's shabby patriarchal ambivalance and Biel's bodacious ass. (The family may have had to let another three servants go last month, but the pilates trainer apparently still visits three days a week). Old world and new world duel in the form of Picassos versus fox hunts, can-cans versus vaudeville, with relationships frayed, mended, torched and born anew.
It's all a little graceless, even for Elliott, whose Priscilla, Queen of the Desert synthesized music, culture and high camp in a spiky bundle of art-house TNT. Those crisp fingerprints are smeared here, literally refracting his update of Coward's subjects through spoons, looking glasses and anything else with distorting properties. Firth is worst for the wear, his perpetual burnout tamping down one histrionic Scott fire after another. And neither he nor Biel benefit from the conflations of their post-traumatic stress disorders -- his from watching his men die in battle, hers from watching (and maybe even helping) her first husband perish from cancer.
Again, though, that one's on Coward. Biel works valiantly against his nostalgic tide, a counterfeit force that Coward didn't earn and which Elliott (at least outside the soundtrack) regards with little to no sense of irony all these years later. The real currency here is the loss of self that accompanies loving someone; cynical, sure, but that's the price of doing business with this writer. And there, Biel manages just fine: exasperated, furious and deeply conflicted over the trade-offs that come with independence. "You don't know what love is," she finally counsels her manchild bridegroom, and for once, under that awkward blond bob, Easy Virtue achieves sincerity. Two minutes later, it's over. Whether it's 90 minutes or 85 years, it hardly seems worth the wait. RATING: 5.5