Easy Virtue

Directed by Stephan Elliott

(PG-13)

***

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An English aristocrat upsets his family by romancing an American girl.

Noël Coward would leave Easy Virtue applauding, said Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter. Director Stephan Elliott has done a “smashing” job of updating the English playwright’s 1924 satirical comedy, in which a British aristocrat (Ben Barnes) marries a racy American girl (Jessica Biel) much to his family’s dismay. With Elliott at the helm, the film proves both a “visual and verbal feast.” Coward’s cheeky critique of English society will “charm your pants off,” said Ella Taylor in The Village Voice. Biel has fun playing a flapper and holds her own against England’s finest, including Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth. She is “upstaged by a hilariously WASP-ish Thomas,” however, who steals the show with her Queen Elizabeth II hairdo and “all the best lines as Mummy Dearest.” Still, there’s a ­reason Easy Virtue remains one of Coward’s lesser-known plays, said Christy Lemire in the Associated Press. Written the same year as the hilarious Hay Fever, the script nevertheless lacks that story’s bite. Elliott’s flashy, 21st-century editing style and obvious visual gags feel “uncomfortably forced.”