Elliott's Noel Coward adaptation isn't going to win any awards, but has a nice breezy charm.
It's the late '20s, and John Whittaker has unexpectedly returned home to the family estate after some time spent traipsing around the Riviera; even more surprising than his return is the fact that he's newly married, and to an American, no less. Larita (Jessica Biel) isn't particularly trashy or vulgar by American standards, but to a proper British lady like John's mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), she's a disgrace. Still, Mrs. Whittaker is delighted to have her son at home, and wants the couple to live there; Larita, a city girl at heart, wants to move to London as they'd planned.
What starts out as a battle for John's soul between Larita and Mrs. Whittaker takes some unexpected twists along the way, with lots of those marvelously bitchy Coward bon mots. Kristin Scott Thomas is splendid, as is Colin Firth as her husband. Ben Barnes isn't asked to do much more than be young, pretty, and naive, and he's entirely up to the task. The surprise is Jessica Biel, who is quite good here. She's not up to the level of Scott Thomas, to be sure, but she doesn't embarrass herself, and she has a pair of spotlight scenes -- one involving the family dog, and a tango at the annual Christmas party -- which she gets just right.
The score is mostly made up of songs from the era by Coward and Cole Porter, many of them sung (very nicely) by Biel or Barnes in performances that have been digitally scratched up to sound like period recordings. The opening and closing credit numbers deserve particular notice; Biel's "Mad About the Boy" opens the movie, and over the closing credits, we get a 20s-style arrangement of (of all things) Billy Ocean's "When the Going Gets Tough" that works surprisingly well.
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