How to describe “Blithe Spirit,” a play that switches genres more times than one can count? Is it a comedy, a drama, a romance, a murder mystery? Is it art or exploitation? It’s, actually, all of the above.
Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” is a whole lot of genre: a screwball comedy about paranormal activity, dressed as a period piece. The play has been staged numerous times on the West End and on Broadway, adapted as a musical (“High Spirits“) and filmed as a movie in 1945, directed by David Lean. It’s a frizzy, fast-paced production that never fails to make us laugh…until now.
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In this particular adaptation, the play has been given a show-biz twist, with the novelist, Charles Condomine (Dan Stevens), struggling to write a screenplay for the producer father of his wife, Ruth (Isla Fisher). For reasons not made entirely clear, they invite a spiritualist (Judi Dench) into their home to conduct a seance. And voila! She summons the spirit of Charles’ first wife, Elvira (Leslie Mann), who died in a car accident eight years prior.
As in the play, only Charles can see Elvira, though she proves her existence–and her intent–pretty well despite her invisibility. She drives Charles mad with her ghoulish tricks and persistent insistence on being seen by him, trashing the garden and throwing knives at the servants, along with a host of other pranks that would have most people calling 9-1-1 or Ghostbusters. But Charles needs her around, and it’s obvious he still has feelings for the blonde bombshell with a well-stocked wardrobe and well-read vocabulary.
This means trouble for Ruth, and supernatural hijinks ensue as she tries to win over her husband. Over the brief, 90-minute runtime, director Edward Hall tinkers with the original dialogue, while staying true to the major plot points of Coward’s play. Screenwriters Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard, and Nick Moorcroft have taken the bone-dry wit and pumped extra sugar into it, as well as some unnecessary preservatives. It’s as if they thought Coward’s play wasn’t good enough, so they had to modernize it with a ghostwriter sub-plot, plus a sentimental backstory that could have been written by Robert Zemeckis.
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“Blithe Spirit” has a lot in common with “Death Becomes of Her”: a love triangle, an immortal potion, a catfight over a man who isn’t worth their time (if it weren’t for Steven’s good looks, Charles would be the last guy you would want to go out with). The action and comedy are also similarly clumsy.
What’s so wrong with a little light, throwaway humor as escapism? If only the humor was humorous. “Blithe Spirit” whipsaws between slapstick material with a particular focus on invisible objects, and hoary jokes about erectile dysfunction that are neither frisky nor funny. They just sort of hang in the air like bad spirits.
The refusal to land on a consistent tone is the downfall of “Blithe Spirit,” in which serious ideas about authorship are coupled with strange and peculiar jokes. Silly, scary, supernatural comedy can be a tricky line to walk, a line “Blithe Spirit” doesn’t even bother toeing. It just blows the lineup. The whole thing is a wildly uneven, extremely repetitive mess that could have used a few rewrites, as well as another look at the genial, genre-bending source material. [C-]
“Blithe Spirit” is in select theaters and VOD now.
