As our favorite Jewish Papa comments as the Broadway classic Fiddler on the Roof begins: “How do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: Tradition.” As the so-named song pretty much says, in a world where all of us might just as well be fiddlers precariously balancing on rooftops, the least we can do is remember the roles we were born to play. But as the story that follows reminds us, on the off-chance that we want our lives to be something more than just a balancing act, tradition alone simply isn’t going to cut it. And in Easy Virtue, that’s pretty much what we get… in a 1920s, British, comic kind of way.
Based on the 1924 play by Noel Coward, Easy Virtue is a tale of rebellion against the norm and the norm’s determination to squelch that rebellion at all costs. It is about the collision of modernity and tradition. It is about the clash of ancestry and progeny. And starring Jessica Biel as Larita, a modern American race car driver; Ben Barnes as John Whittaker, Larita’s groom and the young heir to his family’s fortune; Kristen Scott Thomas as Mrs. Whittaker, the overbearing matron of the Whittaker household; and Colin Firth as Mr. Whittaker, the withdrawn war veteran who has long since ceased to be the head of his household, it is about one woman who greets life with passion and one who greets it with constraint, one man who greets the world with youthful naiveté and one who faces it with jaded cynicism, and the difficulty that becomes their coexistence.
Beginning with the sun-soaked meeting and marriage of Larita and John and quickly jumping to the dreary Whittaker estate, the majority of Easy Virtue follows the sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, always satiric war for John’s love and allegiance. As one might expect, it involves borderline pornographic artwork, not-so-subtle manipulation, even less subtle guilt trips, and one or two spectacles of sarcasm lost in translation. But where its general themes of early feminism and 1920s-era hypocrisy definitely weave through every one of its battles, its final showdown is neither the triumphant victory of progress nor the tragic destruction of independence that you might predict. And in the end, Easy Virtue is actually less a story about tradition or rebellion and more about what might lie behind both.
While Larita may firmly hold the position as the movie’s star and Mrs. Whittaker as her nemesis, perhaps the most interesting character in the movie is the near-silent Mr. Whittaker. Where Tevye’s Papa was the overbearing father determined to uphold tradition, Mr. Whittaker is a man who has stopped even pretending to find meaning in the rules and rights by which those around him live. But while his near-reclusive existence and hilariously subversive interjections seem almost stubbornly childish at first, as he tells Larita about his experience in the war, he suddenly seems the most mature of the bunch. Asked why he wandered around for months before returning home, he replies, “I was trying to figure out what exactly all these fine young men had died for.” And in that statement, he points to the idea that whether we live lives of tradition or rebellion, if there is not something of substance behind that tradition or rebellion, if there is not a reason for holding onto what we know or fighting for what we believe, then neither the battle nor the return is worth much of anything.
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May 22nd, 2009 at 8:48 am
Thanks for the review, Elisabeth. Unfortunately, this movie is not available in my area. Having followed Ben Barnes from Prince Caspian, I would love to see him in a disparate role.