Film

Virtue may be easy, but comedy in the sophisticated Noël Coward style is hard. Following the early Coward play, Elliott and coscreenwriter Sheridan Jobbins have tackled the hypocrisy of the supposedly moral people who judge others. Let us hope it is not hypocritical to judge this film and find it wanting.

The chief villain here is Mrs. Whittaker (Scott Thomas, brittle and sharp), the lady of a vast estate who looks with cool disapproval on the innovations of the jazz age. When her son John (Barnes, a handsome placeholder for a character to be filled in later) brings home his race-car-driving bride, Larita (Biel, wrestling period speech heroically if not always successfully), Mrs. Whittaker takes an immediate dislike to the woman and thus begins a battle of wills, in which Larita finds an unexpected ally in the melancholy Colonel Whittaker (Firth, too tired to even dial, let alone phone it in). It’s a jaunty free spirit (Larita has, gasp, been married before!) versus a harpy mother. Gee, whose side are we on?

Elliott and Jobbins take Coward’s play, which is one of his less comical affairs, and try to wacky it up with the accidental death of a dog (honestly) and modern tunes such as “Sex Bomb” done in a ’20s style. But even if the wacky material worked, which it doesn’t, trying to make Coward zany is to misapprehend what makes him worth reviving.