Easy Virtue: Jessica Biel's killer ass

I hope there's a recording out there of a producer selling Easy Virtue to a studio executive as "Merchant/Ivory meets Wedding Crashers," because that's the kind of inanity that would explain how a Noel Coward play could turn out to be such a dull and semi-zany movie.

Jessica Biel plays a post-WWI American adventuress who, after a whirlwind courtship, marries into the Whittaker clan, a family of landed English gentry. Does the liberated American woman shake up the hidebound English twittery? Yes! Does the harpy matriarch (Kirsten Scott Thomas) get her comeuppance? Yes! Does the depressive patriarch (Colin Firth) regain his spark of life at the appearance of his shiny new in-law? Yes! Do their useless adult leeches children get a lesson in how to live life from the spirited outsider? Is the long suffering, phlegmatic domestic staff ecstatic at the chance to work with the new mistress of the house to get their revenge on the old mistress? Are there balls and fancy dresses and fox hunts? Yes, yes, and oh yes and how!

( Ben Barnes as Biel's husband: I have never so desperately wanted a movie character to be killed since Jar Jar Binks )