Easy Virtue is a much better film than American Beauty. This is hardly surprising, given that Easy Virtue started out as a Noël Coward play, and that, in any case, being better than American Beauty is not a high bar to clear. We ought not look to the movies for moral instruction — God save us from Hollywood didactics — but films that rely on moral tension for their dramatic impact must of necessity take moral questions seriously in order to succeed as works of art, and it is on this count that Easy Virtue disappoints, despite the pleasures afforded by Noël Coward’s cold wit and Jessica Biel’s warm body. Easy Virtue relates the story of a disintegrating English family of the landed gentry, minor provincial aristocrats ensconced for seven generations in a palatial country house. The paterfamilias, Jim Whittaker (Colin Firth), is a poetic soul ruined by the Great War and the losses endured there by the men of his village, possibly owing to his own incompetence as an officer. He descends into postwar debauchery, sporting an Allen Ginsberg-style scraggly beard and sunglasses, and spouting Allen Ginsberg-style politics. His wife, Veronica (Kristin Scott Thomas, empty of sex and full of venom), comes to fetch him home from a French whorehouse to the foundering farm and his unmarried daughters, one a religious bore, the other a devotee of sensational true-crime journalism. The Whittakers’ heir, John (Ben Barnes), a sweet and callow young man, has been gallivanting around the Continent, where he has impetuously married the film’s heroine, Larita (Jessica Biel in full va-va-voom mode), a strapping blonde American feminist who makes her living as a race-car driver. She intends to set up housekeeping in London with her new love, but his mother — despairing of her useless husband and daughters — has invested all hope of a restoration of her family’s fortunes in her only son, and therefore maneuvers to keep him on the farm. It goes without saying that she is, therefore, the villain of the piece, crueler than the Kaiser’s bayonets. Taking the self-righteous matriarch as an easy target, Easy Virtue executes a sustained attack on hypocrisy (a defensible minor vice that is second only to alcohol in its value as a social lubricant) and on the putative hollowness of conventional family life. Yes, all very shocking, &c. The suffocating habits of the horsey set were more of a live issue in 1924 when the play was written; constructing a critique of excessive social conservatism in an age of publicly funded sex-change operations borders on the absurd. The moral edifice stormed by Noël Coward’s generation was a mighty fortress; today it is a ruin. This necessitates the coarsening of the film’s characters and the amplification of its plot devices: In Coward’s play, the scandal in Larita’s past is that she is divorced and that her husband accused her of conducting an affair with a painter for whom she had posed nude. In the new version, Larita has killed her first husband but was acquitted of his murder. When her fragile new marriage crumbles, she does not go slinking out into the night, but instead thunders off in a speeding BMW roadster with her husband’s father, who is clearly raring to once again let his freak flag fly, grow out that beard, and hit the hookah. It is worth repeating that films are not homilies, and we should not go to the movies to receive moral improvement. But when a film such as Easy Virtue cannot address the moral questions it raises in anything but the most perfunctory way, it chokes on its own smugness. The young and weak John is pitied for his failure to escape the control of his mother, and, tucked under the hen’s feathers, he endures an emasculating permanent childhood. But what of the state of his father, and his permanent adolescence? The film fails to acknowledge that the two men are in the same condition — manhood unachieved — but one is contemptible, the other heroic. Why should that be? What obligations might young John owe to his family, even to his conniving mother and detestable sisters? And perhaps poisoning to death one’s husband is not a self-evident act of love, even though he is suffering from cancer? It may be true that the vilified Veronica is wrong to dismiss Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah as pornography, but it is far from uncontestable that she is obviously and culpably so. In the same vein, it is not obvious that the best choice is to abandon one’s family in order to launch a relationship with one’s daughter-in-law. The filmmakers’ inability to take hold of these questions diminishes the heft the movie might otherwise have achieved. Deprived of a meaningful moral context, the events of the story are only events. Worst, the filmmakers are blind to the great irony of their adaptation: In their need to amp up the shock value of Larita’s transgressions, they confirm the very bourgeois suspicions they meant to falsify: That slope was slippery, after all. Easy Virtue pretends to challenge conventionality but it is convention itself, substituting 21st-century middle-class mores for those of the declining post-Edwardian rustic remnant. Which is to say, it follows American Beauty in flattering the audience that the greatest good is to be found in the pleasures dearest to them: leisure, foreign travel, sexual license, and a hot car. (The 1929 BMW roadster upstages Biel whenever the two appear together, just as the 1970 Firebird outshone Kevin Spacey in American Beauty.) There are pleasures to be had here, particularly from Coward’s sparklingly spiteful dialogue and from the snatches of his songs and contemporary jazz works that punctuate the plot. But there is no creature walking the earth so sure of himself as the Hollywood liberal — George W. Bush is René Descartes compared to Sean Penn — and here that unrelenting self-assurance prevents Easy Virtue from stopping to think, if a film may be said to think, about the questions it raises, thereby diminishing a good film that might have been great. – Kevin D. Williamson is a deputy managing editor of National Review.