Sunday, June 28, 2009

Easy Virtue (Saturday, June 27, 2009) (75)

This is a delightful genre comedy set in the late 1920s/early 1930s on an English country estate. The son of the family has just married an American woman who is a professional race car driver (what?) and the family doesn't approve. Well, the mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and the two sisters don't like the new wife (Jessica Biel.... ahhhhh), but the husband (Colin Firth) likes her independence and her freshness in the stuffy world they live in.

What follows is a broad comedy at times reminiscent of John Schlesinger's Cold Comfort Farm where each character's exotic idiosyncrasies add to the fun story. One especially clever thing is the use of contemporary pop music played in a '20s jazz flapper style... it's clever...

There's nothing totally deep or fresh about this, but it's got great acting and a charming script. There are not a ton of genre pieces like this, and this one is really nice.

Stars: 3 of 4

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