Sony / 2008 / 96 Minutes / Unrated / Street Date: September 15, 2009
Start with a stage play by one of the leading literary lights of the English language, adapt it for the screen, stir in music by a primo 20th century American composer, cast excellent actors, and you're bound to have a good movie.
Easy Virtue was originally written by Noel Coward, whose witty dialogue scathingly exposes the foibles, phobias, posings, and hypocrisies of humans in general and the British upper classes in particular. Period film clips, Art Deco typeface, Cole Porter tunes, and other music of the times gets us into the mood for this mode of frothy frosting atop a solid story and psychologically well-drawn characters.
The film opens with playwright Noel Coward's song, "Mad About the Boy" and decidedly sets the theme of passion and obsession, but with a fillip of fun.
1928. A motorcar race in Monte Carlo. The finish line. The winning car. The driver removes his helmet to reveal that he is – gasp! – a woman, beaming with the glow of victory and smiling over at her new husband.
Playboy English aristocrat Johnny "Panda" Whittaker takes his new bride Larita, the Alpha Babe race-car driving American widow, home to meet the family. From her first look at the stately family "pile" in the English countryside and the family's first look at this snazzy dame, Larita's life becomes a struggle to be accepted by John's mother and sisters, who stop just a few syllables short of branding her a "floozy". Horrors!
John's father (Colin Firth) is a frumpy, shell-shocked man who would rather have stayed lounging about in the Parisian opium dens after World War I, far from his oppressive aristocratic land-owning obligations. He wears Trotsky sunglasses and schlumps around in down-at-the-heel clothes, probably all bespoke if truth be known. Larita makes a very telling comment about him: "Quietly sardonic. I like that in a man." Yeah, me too.
Let me introduce you to the rest of this staid English family facing Larita's American exuberance.
Kristin Scott-Thomas plays Mrs. Whittaker, a hegemonic harpy with dog-in-hand, ready to scythe away at anything befouling her idea of her son John taking over the family estate and bringing it up out of near-bankruptcy.
Older sister Marion is a delusional nunlike frump with extravagant excuses to explain the absence of her supposed fiancé.
Younger sister Hilda is a moon-calf obsessed with the idea of romance. She's so easily influenced by others that at the local musical review she even… No! I'll save that for you to see for yourself. My mother staged a musical review in our small Texas town not long after WWII and apparently raised a similar sort of scandal. They were still talking about it decades later.
Furber the butler conveys Stephen Fry Jeevesian aplomb with minimal dialogue.
There's a laconic old gardener, John's sweet former fiancée and true friend Sarah, her brother who's the target of Hilda's affections, and her father who seems to have a more than land-baron-bond with Mrs. Whittaker.
Besides the typical comedy-of-manners that's really lots of fun, underpinning this story is the fact noted in the opening song "Mad About the Boy" -- everyone here has an obsession. Here's what I think they are; see what you think.
Larita Whittaker – to reclaim the idea of love after losing her first husband.
John Whittaker – to possess his lovely Larita and enfold her into his life.
Mr. Whittaker – caught in an obsessive depression about his part in the senseless carnage of World War I.
Mrs. Whittaker – to keep the family estate flush and functioning, preferably without the use of (damned) machinery. To keep her children and her son especially down on the farm, since she'd almost lost her husband to Paree.
Marion – to sustain the illusion that she was loved by someone worthy. Unfortunately this girl is a deluded religious fanatic. [Wait! Isn't that redundant?]
Hilda – to find someone who'll love her back.
The story hits all the high points of this genre of English comedy. There is bad English cooking, a fox hunt, dogs all over the house, the all-knowing but never-saying downstairs staff, mis-understood romantic inclinations, tradition versus modernism, the introduction of scandalous newness, and threats from the outside world.
Larita and Mrs. Whittaker are in continual warfare and the battles are ever so fun to watch.
Some of my favourite lines include:
"America, the land of opportunists."
"I'm of the romantic Lost Generation."
"What did you lose?"
"I'm not sure."
"If you want a man's attention, ignore him."
The Thanksgiving dinner set up by Larita gives the opportunity to note that it celebrates "The annihilation of an entire indigenous people".
There 's also a swift sharp exchange about the mythical Greek sirens and the Medusa. As a lover of the classics and myth I do so appreciate when people work them into their stories.
The resolutions of this story revolve around confessions and trust.
Young John is gob-smacked by his responsibility for the family land.
Mr. Whittaker reveals that during his premiere WWI moment twenty thousand men were slain in four minutes. He lost his entire contingent, all from his home village.
Can we today even begin to grasp the enormity of that horror? That's five thousand deaths a minute. And what for? No wonder he was such a wreck.
Larita reveals something tragic and important from her own past, relative to the death of her first husband.
The story spirals down into a well-woven conclusion that nonetheless surprises somewhat.
Regardless of whether or not you like British drawing room comedy, I think you'll appreciate and enjoy this film because it's about how each of us needs to find a place to fit in. We need to find "our people", and we need to be accepted and appreciated. Also, we need to love and be loved.
We're all "Mad About the Boy" regardless of who or what the Boy might be. And that's as it should be.
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