Easy Virtue is an elegant period piece about the last century's
interbellum in the UK. A young heir to a massive but decaying family
estate injects turmoil into his family's affairs when he brings home
Larita, a liberated American wife, the winner of the Monaco Grand Prix, as
played by Jessica Biel. The heir's mother and his wife immediately begin a
fight for his soul, with most of the family siding with the haughty
matriarch against the interloper. Only the heir's world-weary father
supports his marriage and welcomes his lively new bride.
The screenplay is an adaptation of a Noel Coward play which was written
when the story actually took place, in 1924, when Coward was 25 and
cynical. Coward was a pragmatist who looked at England and its aristocracy
with cold detachment, albeit spiced with wit, for the play is a comedy,
not a tragedy, although it is a comedy with some very serious underlying
ideas and a fair share of heartache. In his autobiography, "Present
Indicative," Coward wrote that he wanted to present a comedy in the
structure of a tragedy "to compare the déclassée woman of today with the
more flamboyant demi-mondaine of the 1890's" Yeah, whatever, there, Noel.
Thankfully the actual play is down-to-earth and generally free of
pretentious bullshit and accented e's, unlike that summary.
For reasons not very clear to me, the film's version of the story
altered a sordid aspect of Larita's past.
... In Coward's version, Larita's ex-husband, a jealous man, accused
her of having an affair with a painter when she posed for a nude. She
denied it, but the artist - tormented by unrequited love - committed
suicide. This was presented as proof of infidelity at the divorce trial.
... In the film's version, it was the husband who committed suicide
when he was dying of cancer. There was a trial, but it was a murder trial,
not a divorce proceeding, in which Larita was accused of murdering the
sick man. (Although acquitted, she later admits that she did in fact
assist him to commit suicide, but did so out of love for him.)
The film script thus changed Larisa from a wrongfully accused divorcee
with a scandalous divorce trial to a widow who was hiding a scandalous
murder trial. Perhaps the screenwriters felt that her having been a
divorcee and a nude model was not scandalous enough in 2009 to produce the
emotional impact it generated with 1924 audiences. My own opinion is that
Coward's original version is infinitely more credible, and that anyone who
would be inclined to watch this film would understand that people from the
English upper crust had conservative attitudes toward divorce and nude
modeling in the 1920s.
The film's ending is also a change from the play, although in that case
I preferred the re-write. The play ends with Larita departing alone after
having danced with the twit next door. The film ends with her departing
with her father-in-law, with whom she had just done a sexy tango. That
tango was my favorite scene in the film, by far. An embarrassed Larita
requests a song from the band, the music starts, and she is left hanging
and partnerless by her husband, so her suddenly gallant father-in-law
steps in gracefully. It's possible to see that Colin Firth is no dancer,
but he's such a charismatic performer than he sells the dance completely,
and provides an unexpected but completely welcome bit of erotic tension
between the older man and his daughter-in-law. What will happen when the
two of them leave together? The nature of their future relationship is
ambiguous. Perhaps they will bond romantically, perhaps the young woman
has simply restored the older man's zest for life, and is symbolically
driving him away from his figurative prison. The film is open-ended.
While its heavy-handed treatment of the mother-in-law seems to be more
sitcom material than Oscar material, and its class warfare ground seems
too well-trod by earlier and better pictures, Easy Virtue looks gorgeous
and has some great moments, most of them supplied by Colin Firth as the
complicated, disillusioned war veteran whose will to live had been nearly
exhausted before the arrival of his feisty new daughter-in-law. The
addition of the tango and departure scenes, plus the fact that Firth's
character has the most different dimensions in his character, plus the
fact that Firth's character grows the most, plus the usual fine
performance from Firth, all added up to a major transposition of audience
sympathy from the play to the screenplay. Those elements turned a play
that was originally about about Larita into a movie that was really about
her father-in-law, and not a bad one at that.
