Relative Values (2000)

... sums this up succinctly if not perfectly. It is, essentially, a minor play, by the 'master', Noel Coward, adapted successfully for the screen and acted to a fare-thee-well by a well-chosen cast. Coward of course shot to fame in 1924 and piled success upon success arguably peaking in the late thirties but still weighing in with a masterpiece in the shape of In Which We Serve, written and shot during the war. He wrote Relative Values in the early fifties some four years before Look Back In Anger ushered in the 'Angry Young Man cum Kitchen Sink' mob hi- jacked the theatre and while not top-drawer Coward it still possessed sufficient style to provide a good night out at the theatre. Whilst Coward is easy to imitate he's difficult to replicate and so it is here with the odd exchange 'can we talk man to man?', 'Any other arrangement would be difficult to imagine' reaching for (and just missing) vintage Coward and a group of actors who clearly have never played Coward previously making a decent fist of it. Highly enjoyable and recommended.

This is great fun and a reminder of when actors and actresses just weren't welcome in polite society (and why). Just watching Colin Firth's face is delicious, he is subtle, funny and brilliant! The star-struck maid alone is worth the price of admission; and Stephen Frye is a perfect butler to Julie's elegant, polished master of each successive situation. Sophie Thompson steals the dinner scene and just about every other one she is in. This is a fabulous, literate comedy of manners with everyone spot-on with their characters. Every time I watch it I find something clever, witty and subtle that I missed the previous time. Just sit back and have fun watching all the stereotypes get skewered.

Absolutely and utterly delightful in every way. A triumph!!!!! The story is a bubbling confection of the highest order and the cast is sheer perfection. Colin Firth, one of my favorites was never better. Julie Andrews as always was wonderful. But the cast was uniformly good, a perfect ensemble acting tour de force. My only quibble was Julie Andrews' atrocious costumes - good grief were they AWFUL - wrong colors, wrong cuts, wrong everything. At least finally in the last scene her outfit was attractive, but all through the film I groaned every time Andrews entered the scene with another positively awful costume. Geez! In a major production such as this you would think they would have a designer who understood color and line. But everything else in the film was great. In fact, Jeanne Tripplehorn appears at the end in one of the most beautiful outfits I have ever seen in film - a bright yellow pantsuit that is sublime. She looked fantastic throughout the film. William Baldwin truly looked like the most popular movie star in the world, the character he played. And with Tripplehorn they were a smashing pair. Romance everywhere!

This has to be one of the very worst films I've seen. Admittedly, getting free on the front of a magazine didn't bode well, but this was beyond all expectation, it was truly awful.Not in the least bit funny, just plain boring, my family and I endured this travesty of a film in the hope that it might get a bit better. Even the high profile cast (Julie Andrews, Colin Firth and Stephen Fry) failed to redeem.Most of the film time was spent discussing with my Dad the fact that it was filmed near my cousin's house, a conversation a whole lot more enthralling than the dragged out dialogue dirtying my television set.This truly is an awful film.