Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I made it to the local multiplex yesterday for back-to-back showings of Easy Virtue (an adaptation of the Noel Coward play) and The Brothers Bloom, and I'd heartily recommend both of them.

I've never been a particular fan of Jessica Biel's work, but -- in spite of looking far too buff and toned for the period -- she eventually won me over and had me rooting for her character 'Larita', the American race-car driver who marries a younger man from the landed gentry. My sympathy for her character might initially have had more to do with how well the part was written and adapted in the script, but I have to say she executed it well enough. And, as noted in my review of last year's Then She Found Me, I think I love Colin Firth even more when he's looking harried and scruffy and somewhat the worse for wear, as he definitely is in much of Easy Virtue, playing Biel's new father-in-law who may have left too much of himself in the trenches of World War I.

I haven't seen Kristin Scott Thomas give a bad performance yet, either in French or in English, but she's fiendishly good at being an implacable and oh-so-genteel bully as Biel's indignant mother-in-law. And the actor who played the butler Furber -- Kris Marshall, a name I don't remember hearing before -- stole many of the scenes he was in, as I believe he was intended to.

I don't know how the Noel Coward play originally ended, though I SUSPECT that the curtain may've closed with Larita's rather spectacular exit from her inlaws' house. However, having Larita's father-in-law -- the only person in the entire house (other than the servants) who really GOT her or connected with her in a meaningful way -- jump in the passenger seat of her racecar and drive off into the unknown future with her . . . ? That was brilliant, for my taste! If there aren't already fanfics out there speculating on what might have happened next for Biel's and Firth's characters, then there darn well ought to be, and probably soon will be. I can't be alone in wanting desperately to see that particular part of the story continued.

I may've missed the first minute or two of The Brothers Bloom (I stayed too long listening to the music over the end-credits of the previous movie), but I don't think I missed anything too essential. At any rate, I was hooked by the drama and mischief and underlying trauma of the con-artist brothers played by Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo, the delight of Rachel Weisz as the idiosyncratic heiress who is supposed to be their mark, and a host of strong supporting characters. There was some very dark material hinted at in the past of the characters (nothing explicit, but it seemed pretty clear to me that at least one of the brothers had been molested as a child), but it was told with enough style and panache and insight into the human thirst to write ourselves a better life story and tell it well enough to make it eventually become real to make the traumatic and violent bits not only tolerable, but perhaps ultimately essential to the whole.