Mark Reviews Movies: BLITHE SPIRIT (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 18, 2021

While Blithe Spirit is technically based on the play of the same name by Noël Coward (previously adapted for David Lean's 1945 film), the dry humor and relatively down-to-earth tone of the material is all but absent from director Edward Hall's loose adaptation. The story and comedic aims of this version are so different that, with a few additional changes to the title and character names, the filmmakers might have gotten away with leaving Coward's name out of their movie. Save for the royalties, one wonders if Coward's estate would have preferred that, too.

Instead, screenwriters Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard, and Nick Moorcroft have expanded and heightened the play's story, from the characters to assorted conflicts, and transformed a low-key comedy of manners, which happens to feature a ghost or two, into a theoretically high-energy screwball comedy. They have retained some of Coward's better lines—a play-on-words here and an insult there—but undone the essence (No pun intended) of the piece.

As an adaptation, Hall's movie is a joke unto itself. Removing that element from an assessment of the movie, though, doesn't do it many favors, either. It's too broad, too bland, and almost completely blank in terms of insight or inspiration. Coward's source material, of course, was kind of a shallow romp, too, mainly propped up by the writer's constant wit. In removing the majority of the playwright's clever dialogue, this version is mostly witless.

Charles Condomine (Dan Stevens), a famous writer of crime fiction, has been tasked with adapting his first novel into a screenplay. The author, though, has been struggling with writer's block since the sudden, unexpected death of his first wife seven years ago. His second wife Ruth (Isla Fisher) has noticed that, the way he looks at photos of the dead woman, and his current struggles with another, more physical brand of impotence.

Trying to inspire him, Ruth gets the couple tickets to see the stage show of a spiritual medium named Madame Arcati (Judi Dench). While the show goes disastrously, showing the medium to be a fraud in some ways, Charles has a revelation and, for research purposes, invites Arcati to his home for a private séance. In the process, she unintentionally brings the ghost of Elvira (Leslie Mann), Charles' dead first wife, from the other side.

While Coward got some mileage out of miscommunication and barbs and a fairly cynical view of relationships, the filmmakers here see Elvira's semi-return to the realm of the living as a chance for over-the-top theatrics. Charles becomes a bumbling fool, driven nearly mad—and eventually sent to an asylum—by the appearance of his dead wife and the implications of her return (There's a subplot, turned into the eventual theme of the story, about Elvira being the real writer of her husband's books). Stevens gamely plays this with wide-eyed and sometimes floundering physicality, but with no fault to any of the actors, the whole movie becomes about such comedic fits in one form or another.

Elvira tries to sabotage Charles' career and marriage (He insults an invisible presence standing between him and Ruth or, for another example, his current wife's movie producer father, who punches him square in the nose). Ruth, who is quickly convinced of Elvira's ghostly existence in this version, seeks out Arcati's help in ridding Elvira from the couple's life (Arcati's role is greatly expanded for assorted story purposes—some spiritualist politics, a hunt for a banishing spell, a bit of sappiness involving her own dead spouse—but to little end).

Meanwhile, Charles eventually starts having an affair with the phantom—taking her out on the town for drinks, letting her drive him home, accepting her sexual advances while Ruth is passed out from a spiked drink. It's best not to ask questions about how any of this functions or why the filmmakers thought each of these gags and complications might work.

When Elvira turns into a direct threat against everyone in the house, the story's tone turns from mischievous to malicious (There's one obvious case of murder committed by a ghost here and, arguably, a second one, too). Hall, already struggling with the zany stuff, seems to possess no awareness for how dark some of the turns here are, and Blithe Spirit just continues under the assumption that big, broad, and brash jokes are intrinsically funny. The proof is here that, without clever guidance, they're not.

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