There’s a review of this movie at the Noel Coward Society Website which does the basics nicely.
Amongst the felicities, the casting of Jessica Biel as the Woman with a Past. It’s difficult to adapt a ‘stagy’ stage play, one that exploits the big entrance, the expressive group, the d?nouement with the hero centre stage. Keep too much of that stuff, and the film goes dead; do too much, in an effort to avoid stasis, and you’re out on your own with an unrelated mise-en-sc?ne. (Opera films offer hideous examples of both kinds of failure.)
Coward’s play is full of big scenes and strong confrontations, often with Biel’s character front and centre. Biel holds it together with the complete self-possession of a former model and the presence of a first-rate romantic actress. Not romantic as in romcom; romantic as in ‘extreme and doomed commitments’. She and Kristen Scott Thomas are knockouts.
When I was young, the Coward cult was inescapable. At actors’ parties there was much intense talk about ‘style’, which meant posing about with a campy drawl and world-weary inflections like The Master. (The Brecht cult that came along soon afterwards was similar in its aping of a foreign model but much less amusing.) Nowadays, actors don’t have to work hard to find a way around all that, so we have a chance to appreciate again just what a good playwright he was. Get along to your local ‘art’house.