Impressive acting of Biel and Firth adds color to inconsistent ‘Easy Virtue’
Colin Firth is Mr. Whittaker and Jessica Biel is Larita in “Easy Virtue.”
Here, he is by far the best drawn and most sympathetic of characters in an airless family of British aristocrats aghast to find an American suddenly in the fold.
Young John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) has returned to the clan’s sprawling country estate to announce, without preamble, that he has married an American rally car driver from Detroit. Larita Huntington (Biel) is a self-possessed, adventurous and thoroughly modern woman, qualities her new mother-in-law Veronica Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas) regards with horror. It’s bad enough that she’s a Yank, and a widow, but her unfettered flamboyance is decidedly at odds with the kind of decorum demanded by Veronica, who was expecting her 20-something son to return home and marry within his class.
Veronica is a dour, manipulative pill of a creature, though it must be said that hers alone has been the responsibility (and the pressure) of maintaining the estate with fraying finances, drastically diminished staff, two hopeless daughters (Kimberley Nixon, Katherine Parkinson) and a husband, Col. Jim Whitaker (Firth) who couldn’t care less. The colonel, a retired military officer still haunted by his experiences in World War I, has withdrawn to his workshop. Yet he alone shares his son’s appreciation of Huntington’s vibrance, the gust of fresh air she brings to a mausoleum of a mansion.
source: postandcourier
