JESSICA BIEL AND BEN BARNES IN EASY VIRTUE

Easy virtue, hard laughs in an off-key Noel Coward adaptation

A naive young English aristocrat (Ben Barnes) meets a dashing thirty-something American bleached blonde who races cars in Monte Carlo (Jessica Biel). He is smitten, they marry, and off they go to his ancestral estate where his mama (Kristen Scott Thomas) is antipathetic, his young sisters simpering and snide, and his papa (Colin Firth) very friendly. The butler (Kris Marshall) is naughty. This is the story arc of Noel Coward's obscure play as adapted by Australian Stephen Elliott with help from Sheridan Jobbins. The settings and cars and clothes and hairdos (including Barnes' deliciously slicked back hair, Firth's appealingly tousled locks, and Scott Thomas' tight Marcelle, which goes long and dreamy during her melancholy bedroom aria) are all perfectly post-World War I. But the rhythms and the humor are often leaden and anachronistic. Nor is any of the action ever as wicked as it seems to want to be.

It may be that the Australian director of the hyperkinetic drag saga The Adventures of Pricilla, Queen of the Desert lacked the brittle sense of irony required to do Noel Coward. Perhaps the original material itself is uncertain of tone, considering that Hitchcock directed a dark thriller version of the play when in his twenties. Obviously Elliott's film is meant to be a comedy, but how funny is accidentally sitting on a Chihuahua and crushing all its little bones, and then having to sit down on it again three times to hide the situation as Biel must do when Scott Thomas and Barnes' sisters inopportunely appear? What this would really look like isn't something one wants to think about. The dark humor catches stride when the servants help conduct a secret burial for the poor canine, saying they "never liked the little bitch." But the surprisingly swift devolution of Biel's and Barnes' marriage and the hostility of the female relatives just aren't funny.

And when the girls dig up embarrassing secrets from the blonde wife's past, is that a giggle? Or when Firth talks about fighting in a battle where 20,000 men were killed in the first four minutes? To jazz things up, Elliott weaves in Noel Coward and Cole Porter songs and lyrics at every possible opportunity, even bad ones, like when it's drizzly and cold out for a tennis match and the soundtrack plays "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" ("Go out in the midday sun"). For a complete wrong note, the film's final number is an orchestral version of Billy Ocean's "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going," with Biel and Barnes belting out the lyrics.

Bright and good-looking but clumsily written and continually out of tune, this is one of those misbegotten films whose best lines have all been stolen and shown off in the trailers. One wishes they could have been patched together with a better rhythm in the actual feature; but there aren't enough of them to fill a movie.

There are good moments, and despite the overdone songs, two of them are musical. An amateur county theatrical reveals just why the cancan was once thought to be so naughty. And at a Christmas ball, Firth and Biel do a tango that's both original and sexy.

Whatever failings there are can't be blamed on the cast. Jessica Biel (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I'll Be Home for Christmas, Elizabethtown) hasn't exactly a good background in witty comedy, but she handles herself very well, looking every bit the flapper diva and able to hold her own against the toughest British lady. That would be Scott Thomas. Of course she delivers her just-slightly-over-the-top haughty bitchiness quite perfectly, but she deserves better material. Firth isn't particularly in period or on tone, which is more a mater of casting than any fault in his acting. In the end this hardly matters since he's irresistibly sympathetic as the scruffy, war-traumatized husband. Ben Barnes, who hit it big when he landed the role of Prince Caspian in the Narnia franchise two years ago, is not only charming and dashing (in the naive way called for in the plot) but seems the most like a shallow, giddy Noel Coward character of anybody in the cast, just the sort of Bright Young Thing who looks equally perfect in tennis whites or tails, but is unsuitable for any sort of work. A surprise is the hilariously wicked butler: one can only wish Ken Marshall as Furber had been given a bigger role. Not surprising to find Marshell was in the cast of Frank Oz's extremely funny Death at a Funeral. One wishes these proceedings had that kind of momentum and drollery. They simply don't. Instead, there are too many shots of the imposing facade, the horse and hound, the great hall, the high solarium, the dashing period sports car. We don't need grandeur. We need to laugh.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.