Start with a healthy heaping of Noel Coward, sprinkle liberally with Preston Sturges, layer in the madcap sensibilities of director Stephan Elliott and his co-writer Sheridan Jobbins, and you have the recipe for Easy Virtue, a frothy comedy that serves up some of the year’s biggest screen laughs.
Set at a stately English manor in an unspecified time after World War I, Easy Virtue pits the centuries old traditional ways of the prim and proper Whittaker family against a modern, independent thinking woman.
After falling head over heels for the freewheeling, free spirited Larita (Jessica Biel), John Whittaker (Ben Barnes), the Whittaker’s eldest child, decided to elope first and tell everyone later. Sparks immediately fly when the newlyweds arrive at the family estate. John’s stoic mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) is totally appalled by her son’s actions and takes an immediate dislike to his new bride. On top of being a cigarette smoking, bleached blonde with a questionable past, Larita -- horror upon horrors -- is American.
Larita wants to end the stay as soon as possible. She’s anxious to show John the world. Problem is, the estate, including its vast farmland, is falling apart. Suffering from post WWI combat syndrome, Mr. Whittaker (Colin Firth) has no interest in running it. Mrs. Whittaker, desperate to keep the manor afloat, intends for her son to take charge. And thus, the lines are drawn for a battle of wills. Larita attempts to make a good impression, but one hilarious misstep after another ultimately alienates her from Mrs. Whittaker, her daughters Hilda and Marion (Kimberly Nixon, Katherine Parkinson) and their society friends. The only one on her side is Mr. Whittaker who senses a kindred spirit. It soon becomes apparent that John must choose between his wife and his family.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Easy Virtue is based on a 1924 Noel Coward play, penned when the writer was only 25 years old. Though the film is filled with laughs and exceptionally captures Coward’s spirit and wit, curiously, this adaptation is far different from the playwright's original intent.
“The thing that is so surprising is that it’s a melodrama,” says Sheridan Jobbins during my recent interview with her and her collaborator, writer/director Stephan Elliott. “Coward was pretty young when he wrote it. He always had the eye for hypocrisy. He always had the eye for pretensions and all the rest of it. But it’s a very cruel original work.”
What drew Elliott, best known for the cult classic The Adventures of Pricilla, Queen of the Desert, to the project was his realization of just how tightly subversive Coward was. Though Easy Virtue is a period drawing room drama, the filmmaker saw a lot of himself in Coward’s naughty sense of rebellion.
“The Australian term we use is shit stirring,” says Elliott, who was born in Sydney. “Coward was a shit stirrer. He was looking at the hypocrisy of where he came from and was tearing it apart. The play is very much looking for trouble.”
But as silly as Easy Virtue can get at times, it also has a serious undertone. The depth of its characters and the extent of their manipulations makes this far more satisfying than the usual comedy.
“It’s a clash of cultures, but it’s also a clash of generations and a clash of time,” says Jobbins,
“And clash is everything, man,” adds Elliott.
“You know how it goes... a glimpse of stocking, oh how shocking,” says Jobbins. “And you realize that the traditional Can-Can was done without knickers, that actually is quite shocking. And it’s kind of nice to make a gag out of it.”
“This is the first time you’ll ever see a Sharon Stone shot in a period film,” continues Elliott, adding that the broad humor was mostly inspired by another classic comedy filmmaker. “The film’s not set in any time. I told the wardrobe department that Jessica is from the future, and they could take her up to about 1935. And suddenly, I realized we’ve stumbled into the world of Preston Sturges. And once we realized that, I said we’re going to bring a screwball element into this and that very much makes it a romp.”
Adding to Easy Virtue’s very modern feel is its daring camera work. The film is filled with cutting edge framing and special effects shots. Elliott saw that as a way to wake the movie up. One shot in particular that typifies this involves a billiard ball gliding across the table. As it comes to a stop, it reflects the face of Mrs. Whittaker, smiling smugly, having just scored a victory over Larita.
“They don’t do shots like that in period films,” says Elliott. “That shot with Kristen is just so silly. And it’s great watching with an audience because it gets a laugh. It’s very proudly saying, “I am a special effect. You can laugh at me.”
Elliott and Jobbins reveal it took years to get all the laughs into Easy Virtue, but their effort certainly paid off. Two sequences stand out as sure audience howlers. The first involves a tragic run in between Larita and Poppy, Mrs. Whittaker’s loyal, if not annoying, pet chihuahua. The second occurs when a misunderstanding by younger daughter Hilda results in her performing the Can-Can sans underwear for the War Widows’ Revue.
The stoic Mrs. Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas) Mr. Whittaker (Colin Firth) is tired of being
and her faithful pet dog Poppy to the manor born.
Jessica Biel and Ben Barnes
Easy Virtue’s co-writer Sheridan Jobbins
Adopting Let’s Misbehave, a popular song from the era, as their rallying cry, Elliott and Jobbins took to the task of paying homage to the legendary playwright, but at the same time giving the material a modern twist that would appeal to today’s movie audiences. The duo was all too aware that adapting Coward would draw scrutiny, so staying true to him was a top priority. But Elliott and Jobbins also believe that they had permission from the playwright himself to indulge their own comic sensibilities.
“He said in his memoirs that he didn’t want his works to become museum pieces,” says Jobbins, who has shared authorship with Elliott on Madams, Venetian Wedding, Dog and Ghost. “We saw that as the license to make something for a contemporary audience, so that his message is more relevant and seems really fresh.”
Elliott and Jobbins, who first met when her production company Latent Image produced Pricilla, are sly in accomplishing this. If you listen carefully to the soundtrack, you’ll hear covers of Rose Royce’s 1976 disco hit Car Wash and Billy Ocean’s 1985 classic When the Going Gets Tough alongside familiar 1920s ditties, most notably Cole Porter’s Let’s Misbehave.
Larita embodies the modern woman. When we first see her, she is breezing to victory in the Monte Carlo. (She isn’t acknowledged as the winner because she’s a woman.) Later on, when forced to ride in a fox hunt (she thinks the sport is cruel), Larita takes the upper hand by riding a motorcycle, zooming past the horses and hounds.
Director Stephan Elliott on set with Kristin Scott Thomas
Hilda’s shocking Can-Can number
An offbeat
Easy Virtue
camera shot
