Easy Virtue (2008) got a difficult reception, but the movie almost works. You’d think it would work. It’s a breath of fresh air—a Noel Coward piece of wit and satire is a pleasant change from grunting super creatures. It has a good director—Stephan Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) was a wonderful piece of Australiana. It has excellent actors—Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, and others. The English country estate is gorgeous and the cinematography does it justice. So why didn’t the movie work?
This frothy movie doesn’t get good until it gets serious. The first half of the movie is all giddiness and fluff. Although some viewers might find this tolerable or even amusing, I found it tiresome and then inconsequential, so I was set to not watch the second half. Okay, so the rich English aristocrat brings home a sexy American divorcee and the snotty family doesn’t like her much. But then suddenly the mother yells at her immature son saying that he is blind, oblivious, a disappointment: He should be running the estate and know that it is bankrupt. This revelation is followed shortly by the father explaining to the inquisitive American that he is not a happy camper because he led the men of his village into WWI and brought none of them home alive. Now the comedy of manners has some bite. If the serious element had come earlier, we would have laughed more knowing the depths the social wit subtly manifested.
Just when you’re liking the movie, the ending sort of flops. There’s a preachy, old-fashioned, Agatha Christie-style wrap up and analysis which is out of place and should have been rewritten and reshot. And then in the final scene—I won’t give away the somewhat surprise ending—the ambiguity is entirely unproductive. So struggling through the overly loud music, and the mumbled upper-class accents was, in the end, not worth it, but a few judicious changes would have made Easy Virtue a substantial delight.