Blithe Spirit (2020 film)

Blithe Spirit

2021

Production design – John Paul Kelly
Costume design by Charlotte Walter
Set decoration by Caroline Smith

also involved but far less important:

Directed by Edward Hall
Written by Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard, Nick Moorcroft
Based (allegedly) on the play by Noel Coward

Isla Fisher- Ruth Condamine
Leslie Mann- Elvira Condamine
Dan Stevens- Charles Condamine
Judi Dench- Madame Arcati
Julian Rhind-Tutt – Dr Bradman
Emilia Fox – Violet Bradman
Aimee-Ffion Edwards – Edith, the maid

That’s all the cast you need but they added twenty-nine more. All have nothing to do with the Coward play.
Michelle Dotrice played the cook. The rest I neither know nor care.

Released on Sky Premier 15 January 2021

Looks just like the poster for the Bath Theatre Royal productions

If you don’t know the plot of the Noel Coward play, here it is. Charles Condamine is a crime writer. He wants to write a book about a psychic medium so invites one, Madame Arcati, to conduct a seance at his house with his wife Ruth, and Dr and Mrs Bradman. Madame Arcati to her own shock conjures up the spirit of Charles’ wife, Elvira who died seven years earlier. Charles is torn between Elvira and Ruth. He can see Elvira, no one else can. Elvira plots to kill him so they can be re-united.

Dan Stevens as Charles Condamine, Isla Fisher as his wife Ruth

Oh, dear. The reviews say it all. When you look at the credits, Noel Coward’s name is about twelve screens in, below the costume designer. I expect Noel would be quite relieved to be so far down the list on his own story. He’d want nothing to do with this train wreck. The producers are connected to Downton Abbey, hence Dan Stevens in the lead role of Charles Condamine. So it’s Downton Abbey priorities. Get the best-looking 1930s house, and spend out on costumes and cars. That’s the important stuff. Script? Noel Coward’s wit and brilliant lines? Bin them.

It is truly awful. I have no prejudice against filmed versions of favourite works of literature. But when David Lean made the 1945 film with Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati and Rex Harrison as Charles Condamine, he asked for Coward’s advice, which was ‘Just photograph it.’ The result was a great film classic.

Judi Dench takes that Madame Arcati role. She is woefully miscast, but then even an actor of her calibre must be adrift with all the daft additions to the story. She levitates in a theatre production and crashes into the stalls. She gets expelled from the psychic society in a beautiful London interior set (they do interior sets and frocks in place of of directing, acting and scriptwriting). She gets a Macbeth witches’ scene brewing up a potion of herbs with big gusts of flame. Ludicrously the film ends with her conjuring up the ghost of her World War One love and walking off along the cliff with him. In the last decade I’ve seen Madame Arcati played by Alison Steadman, and then by Jennifer Saunders. I’ve seen the 1945 film. She’s jolly hockey sticks. It’s in the text. Judi Dench is just wrong in the part. If I were casting it tomorrow and looking for younger actors, Miranda Hart might top my shortlist. It’s a job for a natural comic actor.

Then there’s Ruth and Elvira. They look much the same and are much the same. In the play, Ruth is acidic, critical. Elvira is a ghost, sexy but mischievous. Neither actor was right at all in the role. Neither had appeal. I had trouble distinguishing them. In fact they were cross cast. Isla Fisher would have been the better and sexier Elvira. Leslie Mann would have been better as the assertive and annoyed Ruth. Tip: they usually use pale face make-up and/or white hair for Elvira. With a make-up department with credits to twelve people, they should have been able to manage.

Dr Bradman is the sceptical one who thinks it all tosh. Try doing that with just a couple of lines.

The only one I might cast again is Dan Stevens as Charles Condamine. He looks the part (nice suits obviously) but he can do the panic in spite of the dreadful script. At least the proper story involves a car crash as in his Downton Abbey finale, though not him. Who thinks they can write better witty lines for a 1937 setting than Noel Coward? These three certainly can’t.

Charles is now attempting to be a screenwriter rather than a crime writer. He gets caught out in the end as a plagiarist, though Elvira had dictated the novels to him, so she was the plagiarist. We introduce a new person, Ruth’s dad, as the producer. But then we introduce so many extraneous characters. It needs a cast of seven. That’s all. Four people. One psychic. One ghost. One servant, not two. No Greta Garbo. No psychic research person. No sympathetic secretary to such person. No Indian compere for Arcati’s stage show. No three psychiatrists to section Charles, then strap him to a trolley prior to electric shock treatment (the writers may be confusing it with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). No full theatres, no garden parties, no crowded Hollywood film sets.

Dan Stevens as Charles, Leslie Mann as Elvira

They are wobbly on the ghost. On stage we accept that Charles and the audience can see Elvira. No one else can. Here, because they can do SFX and disappear her, they do. I probably would just once or twice, but no more. They do it to death and we never know how real she is. They have an SFX credits list of sixty-one. You could do most of it just by locking off the camera and moving an actor in and out. Oh, we do see a distant SFX shot of the car going over the cliff.

The location? Joldwynds in Surrey, a Deco house. The only thing Noel Coward would have approved of.

It looks glossy. I didn’t switch off because I was watching intently the horror of such a travesty.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

Judi Dench presides over a deathly farce … It can only be described as an un-reinvention, a tired, dated and unfunny period piece that changes the original plot a bit but offers no new perspective, and no new reason to be doing it in the first place … Despite the heavyweight cast, the film’s production values are those of a kids’ TV show that might go out on a weekday afternoon. Dench does her best with the role of Madame Arcati, and she even has a notably surreal moment, carrying out an occult ceremony in a beachside cave. But the rest is a festival of mugging and farcical overacting
Peter Bradshaw, Guardian *

Flat, Dated Resurrection of Noël Coward Farce Proves Some Things Are Better Left Dead … Penning a good, short, pithy screenplay is no easy feat, even when working from solidly proven source material — and one need look no further than “Blithe Spirit,” a tin-eared, lumpen-footed, almost perversely unfunny new spin on Noël Coward’s breezy 1940s farce, for proof … Where Coward’s play built a slinky, arched-eyebrow love triangle from this ludicrous premise, Hall and his screenwriters are more interested in milking it for all the pratfalls it’s worth — which, by the fourth or fifth time we’ve recycled the tepid gag of Charles shrieking verbal abuse at a ghost no one else can see, isn’t an awful lot.
Dan Lodge, Variety

Noel Coward would be turning in his grave … Only minor adjustments have been made. Just the script, thrown out wholesale … Most misused is Dench. Where Lean set Margaret Rutherford loose as a riotous psychic, her successor is stuck as straight woman, a national treasure wheeled out as if on sale in a tourist gift shop. At one point she appears in a red telephone box on top of what could pass for the white cliffs of Dover
Danny Leigh, Financial Times, *

A more than medium-sized disaster: A source of regular distraction is the constant fudging of the issue of just how physically present Elvira’s ghost actually is: one minute she can’t lay a finger on Charles, while the next she can apparently make love to him in the marital bed, beside his unconscious wife. …Their Blithe Spirit is such a self-defeating hotchpotch that even its aims are a mystery. Is it trying to shear Coward of his drawing-room theatricality, or to Downton-ise him – the director, Edward Hall, is a Downton Abbey veteran – or send him up, or refurbish him for modern tastes?
Robbie Colin, Daily Telegraph, *

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