Easy Virtue

It's Elliot, ...But It's Coward!

I didn't want to watch this because it was directed by Stephan Elliot. But it is 'Easy Virtue' by Noel Coward. It's been rewritten heavily, but it does seem to preserve the spirit of the play.

What's Good About It

The performances are very strong in this film. Even Jessica Biel who one might suspect does not have enough chop to be in this company puts in the best thing I've seen from her. Kristen Scott Thomas is a standout as the angry, put upon Veronica and Colin Firth adds a tremendous centrifugal force with his wry presence, keeping it all together. Ben Barnes is not as solid  but he does a nice job.

Begrudgingly (because I never found Stephan Elliot to be terribly profound), I have to say the directing is very good, if a little loose. This is not a taut film. It's more meandering, and has moments that build tension that go nowhere and then surprise you; but it is a good viewing. You could do worse, like watch another comic book hero movie and ponder the decline of thought.

What's Bad About It

I don't know if the problems of the story really translate as well to the present day as they should. It's fun to watch but at the same time you feel like the fundamental problems of the play are culture, but the problem in the film is money. Money always has a solution in  movies while culture is the tougher battleground.

The film goes a long way to explore the cultural differences that would have been perceived in the 1930s, but then turns on the revelation that the real bugbear that is bothering Veronica Whittaker is money. it's actually disappointing because the film works so hard at setting up the problem and you wonder how it's going to work itself out, given the characters.

Also, the tone of Kristen Scott Thomas's Veronica Whittaker is bitchy, but it's the wrong kind of bitchy. That' probably more in the directing than the performance because we know Kristen Scott Thomas is capable of greater subtlety.

What's Interesting About It

The film actually echoes 'Brideshead Revisited' more than Coward's play. It's not as anatomical as 'Brideshead Revisited', and Coward was more condemnatory of the landed gentry in England but there's something of a kindred spirit there. There are moments that also echo 'Vile Bodies' by Evelyn Waugh as well, what with the sports car driving woman.

It must be some kind of revisionist nostalgia that makes the 1930s England almost interesting for its remnant class snobbery falling apart as the money runs out in the Great Depression. It's quaint to watch but you know if you encountered it in real life it would give you nothing but revulsion. Which makes you wonder why they keep going back to this well of intemperate prejudice for our dramatic fodder. Perhaps we are blind to the similarly intemperate prejudices of our own time.

Weird Casting of Jessica Biel Here

I don't think Jessica Biel's face looked good in this period's hair. She's got an odd looking face and the hair made her look stupid. Okay, there are plenty of other things to be watching in this film, but the most distracting thing was how the period hair really didn't suit Biel. Which I guess goes to show there isn't that much wrong with it. The tango she dances with Colin Firth is actually quite nice. It's not meant to be a professional dancer strutting her stuff, it's meant to be an expression of her profound sadness and that comes across very nicely in the performance of the dance. It's good enough to sell the moment when Colin Firth's Jim jumps in her car to escape the manse at the end. There is no rational explanation, you intuitively understand why, and it makes sense because of the tango. Pretty good cinema if you ask me.

The Motor Car

In history, motorised transport essentially liberates the distance a person can move. We come to realise that possession of horses by the gentry allows the gentry a kind of monopoly over people who do not, and so allows them to travel. This is why travel is enshrined in the upper classes' entitlements even today. Going on vacations to places where *ordinary* people cannot go is the privelidge of the wealthy. In that context, a woman with a motor car alone smashes the immobility of that society. This alone should present more drama in the story but it doesn't.

The story seems to elliptically spin around the fact that Larita loves John so much, she cannot leave the nightmare manse, and the drama is played out in the space of this old manor house. Perhaps it is my own personal tastes as a writer that made me keep thinking, when is this woman going to just get in her car and drive away? Of course it turns out to be the denouement, but it seemed really odd that the gleaming, modern, almost anachronistic machine kept inviting and she - as a car racer from Detroit no less - kept ignoring its invitation to just drive away. It's just as hard to fathom as veronica's obsessive demands that Larita ride in the fox hunt.

The Fox Hunt

It's going to be a perennial sticking point for animal lovers but it's hard to imagine the fox hunt disappearing completely in the UK. It's a bit like the Japanese and the whaling fleet. They "just can't give it up because they just can't give it because they just can't okay?" is the illogic behind it. It's not a good one because it applies to things like honour-killings under Sharia law and clubbing seals in Canada and any number of violent, cruel cultural practices. They're objectionable if one applies a universal eye to them but the people who do them will invariably claim a cultural practice defense, and those attacking will always demand the universal to apply by dint of it being universal. It's a sticky point.

In this film, we see the hunt subverted by the acting of riding a motor bike alongside the horses and hounds, which I guess represents the smashing of the cultural practice defense by positing that modernity should supersede cultural practice. I get that but I wonder how many people who mount the cultural practice defense would bother to understand it; that is to say, if you said the whalers "modernity demands you cease" or said to these Islamists, modernity demands you not do honour-killings", or even Canadian furs-seal clubbers "modernity says you shouldn't club baby fur seals", just how much traction that would have. Maybe we modernists are merely imagining that modernity itself is a kind of cipher to stop being barbaric. Maybe it is possible to be modern and barbaric, or worse still, be modern and savage, as the Nazis were. To that extent, the fox hunt scene does make you wonder just how far Europe and Europeans think they have come - It's interesting that way.