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Movies & TV

Easy Virtue

EASY VIRTUE (Alliance, 2008) D: Stephan Elliott, w/ Jessica Biel, Kristin Scott Thomas. Rating: NNNN DVD package: NNNN Rating: NNNN


You don’t need to like British period drama to thoroughly enjoy Easy Virtue. Director Stephan Elliott doesn’t and he explains how he used that when reworking Noel Coward’s 1926 play for a modern audience. He’s also engagingly open about problems with the cast, budget and more.

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Few of these problems show up on the screen, and those that do are blown away by a story that starts out frothy – a young Englishman brings his brand-new American bride home to his disapproving upper-crust family – and then turns dark.

(They have their reasons.)

Jessica Biel owns the show. She’s playful and tender with her boyish husband (Ben Barnes) and by turns pliant and firm with his steely mother, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who brings more subtlety than you’d think possible to rigid disapproval. Their verbal duels are worth the rental price alone.

As Biel’s scruffy father-in-law, Colin Firth has fun trashing his Mr. Darcy image, and Kris Marshall delivers one of the great English comic butlers. He has little dialogue but a wealth of scornful glances.

EXTRAS Director and writer commentary, bloopers. Widescreen. English, French audio and subtitles.

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