‘Blithe Spirit’ rewrite hits wall halfway through
Call it the Wile E. Coyote Syndrome. A movie is chugging along nicely, and then you realize suddenly that it has walked off a cliff and stepped out into open space. It hasn’t fallen but for one reason: Until now, you haven’t noticed the problem. You assumed there was solid ground. But then you do notice and in the moment of noticing, you see it all come crashing down.
Such is the case of “Blithe Spirit,” a new adaptation of Noel Coward’s 1941 play, though “adaptation” is a mild word for what happens here. It’s more like a wholesale rewrite that retains only the era, the title, the character names and the central premise. But that’s fine. The play isn’t sacrosanct, and anyway, it still exists. Filmmakers are free to do what they want with their source material, and to expect that what they do will be taken on its own terms.
Bringing Coward’s plays to life is hard now. Most actors can’t do the style, and the world and cultural associations that allowed Coward’s work to be funny and make sense aren’t necessarily easy to convey or recreate. So, starting from scratch here was not a bad idea on its face, and for about 45 minutes, the new version makes a decent case for itself.
In this version, Charles (Dan Stevens) is a successful novelist suffering from a horrible bout of writer’s block. For reasons not worth going into, he and his wife, Ruth (Isla Fisher) invite a spiritualist ( Judi Dench) into their home to conduct a seance. The unintended result is that Charles’ dead first wife, Elvira (Leslie Mann), returns as a ghost that only Charles can see.
In David Lean’s 1945 screen version, Rex Harrison — as always, a cool customer — played Charles, and part of the fun was in watching this very unflappable English gentleman try to carry on as usual in the face of such an extreme situation. Much of the dialogue consisted of patented witty Coward banter, made yet more funny in that half the time Charles is talking to Elvira, Ruth thinks he’s addressing her. (“I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to Elvira!”) It’s striking just how much comedy Coward could derive from that one little situation.
But in this version, Charles starts off as a tortured nervous wreck. Elvira is needy, not blithe at all, and even the spiritualist, Madame Arcati, is no mere eccentric, but a sensitive woman who dedicated her life to the occult following the death of her young husband some 50 years ago. Thus, the comedy of the new “Blithe Spirit” attempts to ground itself, not in the drawingroom conventions of a Noel Coward universe, but in the needs and emotions of fairly realistic characters.
For more than a little while, this seems like a plausible way to go in 2021. Then Wile E. Coyote steps off the cliff. The problem is that “Blithe Spirit” inevitably must end up in a place illserved by realism. Put simply, there are things that a filmmaker can get away with in a light drawingroom comedy that the audience knows is meant to be absurd. But in a movie that grounds its comedy in reality, things like murder and death have a way of displacing the general mirth.
Stevens, Fisher, Mann and Dench are all fine. All have good moments. The problem is the script, the script, the script. But at least there’s a lesson here for writers: There are ideas that both seem and genuinely are wonderful on page 20 that can tank your whole movie by page 100. The challenge is not just in the making of choice ingredients. It’s making a whole cake.