First Hit: A very disappointing film despite two wonderful actors.
The story is basically about the elder son in the Whittaker family named John (played by Ben Barnes) who is off gallivanting in the south of France when he spies a slightly older American woman Larita (played by Jessica Biel), who has just won an auto race in Le Mans.
They fall madly in love and he brings her home to meet his parents (Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker played by Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas respectively). Mrs. Whittaker despises Larita, as does her daughters, because she is a woman of the world, brash, American, and without refined English behaviors.
Mr. Whittaker is quiet, a bit sarcastic, and in his own world. He doesn't care much for anyone in the house except himself. The house, a very large rambling English estate is falling into disrepair and everywhere you look there are signs of the heritage and estate falling apart.
The audience quickly sees that John is a naïve love struck son who Mrs. Whittaker expected to save them from ruin. However, John is clueless and even when he gets a clue, he has no skills to change their fate. What happens during the rest of the film is meaningless except for the exchanges between Mr. Whittaker and Larita and Mr. Whittaker and Mrs. Whittaker.
One scene which exemplifies the ridiculousness of the film is when Larita accidentally sits on and kills the family dog. Not only does she sit on it once, she sits on it 3 or 4 times and then tries to hide the evidence.
Jessica Biel was miscast, misplaced and misdirected. Scott Thomas was good but a far cry from her previous film “I’ve Loved Her So Long”. Firth was very good and is what kept the film interesting. The writing and direction was extremely poor and it is as if this film didn’t know what it wanted to be, a comedy or drama of which it achieved neither. The rest of the cast, especially the Whittaker girls, were distractions and unbelievable.
Overall: This film made little sense, the chemistry between Barnes and Biel was unbelievable and embarrassing which are probably the feelings Noel Coward would probably feel with this film supposedly being based on something he’d written.