Relative Values

This direct-to-vid "comedy of discriminating taste and dirty little secrets" is supposedly based on a Noel Coward play, but since I've never read the original I'll reserve my critical opprobrium for adapting screenwriters Paul Rattigan and Michael Walker, and director Eric Styles, the latter for dragging the still incomparable Julie Andrews through it. This charmless comedy of manners has Ms. Andrews as a blue-blooded English matriarch forced to suffer the social indignities of a Hollywood diva (Jeanne Tripplehorn), whom Andrews' playboy prince of a son has vowed to wed. Along for the ride are William Baldwin, who, with characteristic 'second-string Baldwin' fecklessness, plays Tripplehorn's still hot-to-trot ex-lover, and Colin Firth, whom the director drapes about the set in the hope of lending the goings-on some dignity. In fact, the only happy thing to report about Relative Values is that Ms. Andrews manages to maintain her dignity throughout, which inadvertently underlines the film's premise: that class will eventually out. Not recommended. (S. C. Sickles)