EASY VIRTUE

★★★ out of four stars

Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, brief partial nudity, and smoking throughout.

Theater: Edina.

With her toothpaste-ad grin and strapping physique, Jessica Biel stands out from her castmates in "Easy Virtue" like a sunflower in a patch of violets. The tale, freely adapted from a 1924 Noël Coward comedy of manners, casts Biel as Larita, a Detroit race car driver who roars into an aristocratic English family trailing a cloud of scandal. The brash American scooped up the wealthy clan's son and heir John (Ben Barnes, "Prince Caspian") in a whirlwind romance. When the newlyweds arrive at the family estate, father (Colin Firth) is formal but gracious. Uptight mother (Kristin Scott-Thomas) greets the adventuress with a barbed-wire smile. When she learns that Larita wants John to leave the estate for a fast life in London, she plots to stop them in their tracks. Larita sets out to charm her in-laws, and if that fails, she'll give as good as she gets.

This old school/Jazz Age head-on collision is scored to songs by Coward and Cole Porter, with snappy, snide new dialogue by director Stephan Elliott and his co-writer Sheridan Jobbins. Scott-Thomas gives her lines a stab of wicked sarcasm; Firth is droll. "What am I supposed to do with this bauble of a woman?" she sniffs. "Hang her," he offers. The filmmakers keep the spirit of Coward while energetically reworking the story with headlong energy and contemporary touches that would fit neatly in a "Meet the Parents" spinoff. Mother's evil lap dog, Poppy, who incessantly barks at Larita, meets a dreadful fate and suffers even worse indignities afterward. Coward might not recognize his massively reworked play, but he'd probably approve. After all, the story is all about breaking with stifling traditions and embracing the exciting possibilities of modern times. That's precisely what this cheeky adaptation achieves.COLIN COVERT