Your garden-variety romantic comedy takes hold in the soil and blooms gradually under the sun, like a rose. Your Noel Coward romantic comedy is a potted orchid -- straight from the hothouse, strictly indoors.

"Easy Virtue" is a fine specimen of the latter, stunningly beautiful to behold for as long as its delicate breeding and shallow roots allow. You don't go to it for permanence but for performance. And you couldn't ask for better performances than those provided by director Stephan Elliott's top-notch hothouse cast.

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'Easy Virtue'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Kristin Scott Thomas.
• Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, brief partial nudity and smoking.
• Web site: www.easyvirtuethemovie.co.uk

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Hottest of them is Jessica Biel as high-spirited Larita, the American wife brought home by boyish British heir John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) to meet the proverbial parents. "Home" is a little 150-room chateau that makes Versailles look like North Versailles. But the parents are even more intimidating than the estate.

It is ruled by matriarchal monarch Veronica (Kristin Scott Thomas) in the manner of Queen Elizabeth -- the one with the big lace collar, not the sensible pocketbook. Predictably, John's mother is not amused by John's bride, whom she presumes to be a gold digger. His sisters (Kimberly Nixon and Katharine Parkinson) are none too keen on her, either. Only his melancholy father (Colin Firth) -- never recovered from World War I trauma -- seems willing to give the girl a chance on her first visit.

"I won't make it 'til Christmas," Larita moans to John, then corrects herself: "I won't make it 'til breakfast."

John's ex-girlfriend Sarah (Charlotte Riley) shows up to complicate things, but the obvious plot conflicts are of less concern -- to playwright and audience -- than the repartee.

"You do hunt, don't you?" asks Mrs. Whittaker in anticipation of the foxes.

"Hypocrites, gossip or defenseless animals?" Larita replies.

The conversation here is more arch than a St. Louis McDonald's, and Coward's poisonously piquant dialogue is constantly entertaining. But the trouble with this kind of 1924 theatrical conversation is that people aren't really talking to each another; they're delivering epigrams and one-up witticisms in a War of the Women that's only slightly less brutal than the War of the Worlds.

One of the best scenes involves Larita's accidental murder of Poppy, Mrs. Whittaker's hideous but much beloved Chihuahua, followed by Poppy's funeral (which includes an Emily Dickinson reading). One of the worst scenes stems from Coward's foray into ponderous profundity, when he gives disillusioned Mr. Whittaker the line: "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh" -- in French!

Thomas, though, is terrific, chewing up the scenery in high style, and Biel is a beauty who gets better as the story goes along. Loverboy Barnes is nice to look at, while Kris Marshall does well as the bored butler of the piece.

The 1920s production design and fabulous music add a great deal, from a great opening "Mad About the Boy" sequence through tunes like "You're the Top," "You Do Something to Me" and "Let's Misbehave."

But Martin Kenzie's gorgeous cinematography makes the thing -- dissolving from oval convex mirrors to windows to fireplaces. His single most marvelous image has Mrs. Whittaker in a violent pool-table shot that rebounds -- in reverse zoom -- to the reflection of her face on the 8-ball.

That's worth the price of admission itself, but then comes the climactic tango scene. Turns out, Larita has a past that becomes her melodramatic present, and the tango leads her (and us) straight to a ridiculously satisfying ending.

Satisfying as long as you're satisfied with theater, not life, on film.