Ben Barnes and Jessica Biel star in Easy Virtue.

Sony Pictures ClassicS / Giles Keyte

Easy Virtue, Stephan Elliott’s carbonated screen adaptation of an early Noel Coward play, is so intent on sustaining a facade of fizzy effervescence that it incorporates bouncy period-style versions of songs by Coward and Cole Porter as a peppy running soundtrack.

One character, John Whittaker (Ben Barnes), a dewy English upper-class twit who brings his glamorous, somewhat older new American wife, Larita (Jessica Biel), home to meet his poisonous family, is so enamored of the songs that snippets of the lyrics seep into his dialogue.

It may be a cute device that works for a while, but Elliott, who wrote the screenplay with Sheridan Jobbins, overuses it in a movie whose breathless, hyperkinetic style harks back to his 1994 comedy, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. (Since then Elliott has directed only two features, Welcome to Woop Woop and Eye of the Beholder.)

This movie’s insistent Jazz Age lilt is ultimately at odds with a play written in 1924 that attacks the hypocrisy, smugness and benighted values of the English landed gentry between the wars. The screenplay includes scattered Coward bons mots, but the witticisms don’t come as thick or as fast as in his later plays.

Easy Virtue follows the travails of Larita, a brash, beautiful, widowed racecar driver from Detroit whom John meets in Monaco and impulsively marries. John’s mother, Veronica (Kristin Scott Thomas), is predisposed to loathe her new daughter-in-law. And from the moment Larita steps out of John’s BMW roadster onto the Whittaker estate, she campaigns for Larita’s undoing.

In its cold-eyed assessment of the English aristocracy Easy Virtue has none of the lurking Anglophilia found in Merchant-Ivory movies. The interior of the castle on the family’s 400-acre estate is shabby and filled with lumpy furniture that is as ugly as it is uncomfortable looking. Except for a Thanksgiving dinner that Veronica arranges, the food is unappetizing.

Scott Thomas, deglamorized to play Veronica, is an embittered, snobbish dragon lady who derides Larita as a “floozy.” Larita’s allergy to pollen — she sneezes when given a tour of the castle’s attached greenhouse — symbolizes the unbreachable divide between the two women. Her gift of a Cubist painting turns out to be exactly the wrong present.

Veronica’s husband, Jim (Colin Firth), disheveled and unshaven, spends his days tinkering in his automotive workshop. In the film’s most poignant moment he recalls the slaughter of all the men under his command during World War I. After the war this self-described member of “the romantic lost generation” drifted around France carousing and having affairs.

John, the family’s golden boy, may be charming, but once in the shadow of his possessive mother, his independence and resolve dissipate rapidly. His two dreary sisters, Hilda (Kimberley Nixon) and Marion (Katherine Parkinson), both under Veronica’s thumb, become allies in her campaign to destroy his marriage. The little melodramas that erupt in the Whittaker household loom large. There is an accident involving the family’s Chihuahua for which Larita takes the blame; a local revue in which one daughter, at Larita’s supposed behest, scandalizes the family by dancing a cancan without her scanties; a fox hunt in which the ever-spirited Larita, who abhors hunting as a blood sport, rides a motorcycle instead of a horse.

As scandalous secrets are uncovered about Larita’s first marriage to a much older man who died of cancer, her callow young husband, with whom she has a spicy sex life, begins to withdraw. The movie uses ingenious visual symbols — curved oval mirrors and stuffed animal heads — to suggest the Whittakers’ warped Victorian values and the deadness of a culture Larita finds unendurable. You wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon with the dull, doughy-looking local gentry who attend the Whittakers’ parties.

If Coward, later in his career, became an eloquent defender of all things English, Easy Virtue suggests that the ardent patriotism that took hold in the ’30s and ’40s had yet to assert itself. The free-spirited Larita — and by implication, America itself — represents the brave new future; the Whittakers and all they stand for might as well be extinct.

**1/2

Easy Virtue

Starring: Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Barnes, Kris Marshall, Kimberley Nixon, Katherine Parkinson, Pip Torrens, Christian Brassington, Charlotte Riley.

Rated: PG-13, contains sexual situations.