Review: This 'Blithe Spirit' adaptation isn't as light or as substantial as Noël Coward intended.
We don’t usually blame William Shakespeare when a production of “As You Like It” goes off the rails — but Noël Coward doesn’t completely get off the hook for the problems in “Blithe Spirit,” a pale adaptation of Coward’s 1941 farce.
On the other hand, the three credited screenwriters — Nick Moorcroft, Meg Leonard and Piers Ashworth — who messed around with Coward’s quick-witted dialogue may bear the blame, along with director Edward Hall, who strikes a dull visual tone that makes it hard to differentiate between the living and the recently deceased.
The movie’s ostensible hero is Charles Condomine (Dan Stevens), a crime novelist in 1937 who’s got writer’s block as he tries to adapt his first best-seller into a screenplay. He’s supposed to deliver a script to a demanding producer, Harold (Dave Johns), who happens to be the father of Charles’ prim-and-proper wife, Ruth (Isla Fisher). What Charles can’t admit, to Ruth or to himself, is that he hasn’t written a thing since his first wife, Elvira, died seven years earlier.
After seeing a stage show featuring a klutzy psychic, Madame Arcati (Judi Dench), Charles has the idea of incorporating a medium into his detective screenplay. To learn some of the patter, Charles invites Madame Arcati to the house for a private seance — which ends with Elvira materializing in the living room, visible only to Charles. Elvira is none too pleased with how Ruth has altered her old house, or with how Charles seems to have moved on from their passionate romance just because Elvira is, well, deceased.
Coward’s storyline feels painfully dated, and the efforts by the new writers to goose things up with references to the pre-war equivalent of Viagra seem to go in the wrong direction entirely.
The cast is game to zip through the dialogue and throw themselves into the various pratfalls. Alas, only Mann seems to be enjoying herself as the spectral first wife causing mischief. Next to her, nobody else in this “Blithe Spirit” has a ghost of a chance.
——
‘Blithe Spirit’
★★
Opens Friday, February 19, in theaters where open, and as a video-on-demand rental. Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and some drug material. Running time: 95 minutes.