-By Rex Roberts

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Despite its cheeky title, Easy Virtue isn’t one of Noel Coward’s better-known works, having the misfortune of debuting the same year as the oft-revived Hay Fever. Alfred Hitchcock turned the play into a silent film, sealing its fate as a footnote to cinematic history until producers Joe Abrams and Barnaby Thompson, enlisting Australian filmmakers Stephan Elliott and Sheridan Jobbins, revived it for this handsome production shot on location at Flintham, Englefield and Wimpole halls…a trio of iconic British cottages, as their privileged owners referred to them a century ago, that have been transformed into mausoleums for a nostalgic public wondering what life was like before the world went modern.

According to director Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) and co-screenwriter Jobbins, life among the upper-class English in the 1920s was stifling. Coward no doubt seemed subversive and iconoclastic biting the hand that fed him—the Victorian and Edwardian conventions he satirized hadn’t succumbed to egalitarian impulses—but contemporary adaptations of his work, at least this one, tend to be heavy-handed in their depictions of what we now regard as a hypocritical and increasingly pointless society. Easy Virtue, as a consequence, seems much ado about all that jazz, a well-worn story about a motorcar-driving, cigarette-smoking, sexually liberated American woman who disrupts the fustian routine of a fox-hunting, tennis-playing, repressed British family destined for the rubbish heap of history. The filmmakers might as well have gone duck-hunting in the baroque fountains decorating the lawns of these Palladian castles.

Glamorous Larita (Jessica Biel) has been touring Europe in her roadster, winning rallies when judges allow, until she falls head-over-wheels for John Whitaker (Ben Barnes), an eminently eligible heir. They marry impetuously and, as the film gets underway, motor up the expansive driveway of John’s country house for their homecoming party. Inside await John’s doting mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), his world-weary father (Colin Firth), two spoiled sisters (Katherine Parkinson and Kimberley Nixon), and a subversive, tipsy butler named Furber (Kris Marshall). Mrs. Whitaker is predisposed to dislike Larita, whom she rightly suspects of harboring modern attitudes, such as treating servants with civility; Mr. Whitaker, on the other hand, embraces Larita, as much as he can embrace anything, for he continues to suffer emotional wounds from World War I.

Easy Virtue spends most of the following hour setting up comic bits based on the incompatibility of progressive, vivacious Larita and the snobbish, let-’em-eat-cake Whitakers, including John, who can’t break free from Mum. Larita, for example, accidentally sits on the family’s yapping dog, requiring Furber to participate in a clandestine burial in the rose garden—a gag so tired there’s no danger of spoiling the fun by revealing it. The internecine feud turns to open warfare when a letter from an uncle living stateside reveals Larita to have a scandalous secret involving her dead first husband.

One might say Larita never had a chance to win over her prejudiced in-laws and save her fledgling marriage, but in fact it’s quite the opposite: The audience is never allowed to empathize with the Whitakers, except, of course, Colin Firth’s jaded patriarch, a slovenly bloke who hates his wife, his life and every damn thing. We’re meant to like him nevertheless, for he sees the future and it’s us. Indeed, the movie ends with his shocking gesture of defiance, a most modern transgression. For this reviewer, however, the gesture amounts to so much queasy virtue.