Blithe Spirit is a cinematic adaptation of the play by Nöel Coward, starring Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, and Judi Dench. It's...not great.
In 1937 England, crime writer Charles Condomine (Stevens) has had a bit of dry spell. Rather, he's had a dry spell of seven years, ever since his wife Elvira (Mann) died in an accident. He's since remarried to Ruth (Fisher), the wealthy daughter of the film producer (Simon Kunz) who wants to make a film out of Condomine's most successful book.
But then they go to see the "psychic" Madame Arcati (Dench), and Charles gets the idea to incorporate the occult into his story (maybe having the detective be a ghost who solves his own murder with the help of a medium, which is amusing to me because it's basically the plot of the video game Murdered: Soul Suspect). He has Madame Arcati come over for a seance, but in the process summons Elvira back, and here's where it gets weird.
In the play, you see (which takes place entirely in the Condomines' living room) Charles is pretty much horrified to see Elvira, and, while he does become civil and tries to cope with both his wives being in the house, he never for a moment admits to summoning her up (because he didn't, but we'll get to that). In the movie, Charles winds up having an affair with his dead wife (it's implied he bangs her next to Ruth while she's sleeping). In both, Elvira attempts to kill Charles by sabotaging his car, but winds up killing Ruth instead, and then in an attempt to exorcise Elvira, Madame Arcati manifests Ruth instead.
And here we have our other major points of divergence. In the movie, Charles takes the screenplay that Elvira actually wrote (because she wrote all of his books) and sells it, and as it's being filmed, Hedda Hopper (Georgina Rich) shows up and reveals that all of his books were plagiarized! And then Ruth runs him down with a car and kills him, and Elvira and Ruth drive off Thelma and Louise style, leaving Charles in the dust, as a ghost!
In the play, Madame Arcati tries vainly to banish the spirits, but eventually figures out that it's Edith the maid (played in the movie by Aimee Ffion-Edwards) is a psychic and inadvertently manifested both ghosts. Arcati hypnotizes her and banishes the ghosts, sort of; they're still there and capable of affecting the environment but Charles can no longer see or hear them. But by this point they all hate each other and Charles has a final monologue in which he tells them both off and then fucks off to South America (I actually did that monologue for an acting class when I was in college).
The play is so much better than this movie. A lot of Coward's dialog remains in one form or another, but the movie adds a good hour of unrelated, unnecessary stuff - Arcati going to the Psychic Association offices, Arcati summoning up her dead husband (Tam Williams), the entire filmmaker plotline - and it just bloats and distorts the story. It's a farce, the strength of it is the dialog, and so much of Coward's skill involves being able to see people respond to each other, which you can't do if you're just pointing the camera at one person the whole time.
It's too bad, because the cast is great, but I just wish they'd been allowed to perform Blithe Spirit instead of Blithe Spirit: The Hollywood Version.
My Grade: D+
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Detective Dee & The Mystery of the Phantom Flame
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