Word: larita
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...Larita, the exotic American divorcée who sends her new upper-crust English in-laws into fits, Biel is more than just a pretty face. She's funny and poised, rather than simply posed, as so often is the result when directors are confronted with someone who makes everyone else look like mutton. There are a few moments when you sense the nervous tension inherent in an actress trying to make a breakthrough that could and should change her career, but they are outweighed by the number of times she's in command. She also has the most memorable...
...scissors-sharp matriarch (Kristen Scott Thomas) thoroughly disapproves of her son John's (Ben Barnes) taste in brides. He was supposed to marry Sarah (Charlotte Riley), the girl from the next castle over, who could have restored the family to its former glory. Instead he shows up with Larita, a race-car-driving native of Detroit who doesn't want to play lawn tennis, is a fan of Lady Chatterley's Lover and demands to know the cook's name ("Cook, I can't call you by a verb...
...dallied with French whores at war's end before being fetched home. John's daffy older sister Marion (Katherine Parkinson, whose voice is as treacherously sweet as cotton candy) is halfway to becoming a Miss Havisham. The youngest Whittaker is Hilda (Kimberley Nixon), who is both jealous of Larita and bewitched by her and is, in her troublemaking, a clear precursor to Briony of Ian McEwan's Atonement, written nearly 75 years after Coward's play...
...Elliott adapted Easy Virtue with co-writer Sheridan Jobbins and has been respectful to the basic plot (although he brightens up the ending) and to Coward's gift with a bon mot. "We try not to speak of it," John tells Larita, referencing his father's disgraceful postwar doings in France. "Except in public." I do not have a copy of the original play on hand, but if that isn't lifted straight out of Coward, I'll eat Larita's cloche. (Not until after I've worn it a bit though. Charlotte Walters' costumes are perfection.) I suspect this...
...There is, however, something problematic about Coward, at least as viewed from a 21st century perspective. The zingers are so constant and sharp that everyone has, of necessity, donned emotional armor, but unfortunately, that also tends to keep the audience at a distance. Even Larita, who is so likable thanks to Biel, is a bit of an emotional mystery. She tells us why she married John, but we still aren't sure what she could have seen in him; he's almost embarrassingly boyish. (Biel is actually a few months younger than Barnes, although from her sophistication you'd never...
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