Producers: Danny Perkins, Kris Thykier and Mila Cottray Director: Jim O’Hanlon Screenplay: Steve Dawson, Andrew Dawson, Tim Inman, Jimmy Carr and Patrick Carr Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Ben Radcliffe, Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Tom Felton, Emma Laird, Adam Woodward, Tim McMullan, Anna Maxwell Martin, Jimmy Carr, Lee Boardman, Charlie Rawes, Lizzie Hopley, Sue Johnston, Lily Knight, Magdalena Sverlander, Laurie Ogden, Paula Wharton and Gemma Wardle Distributor: Bleecker Street
Grade: C+
“Downton Abbey” and “Upstairs Downstairs” get the “Airplane!” treatment in Jim O’Hanlon’s deadpan send-up, with a side dose of a goofy Agatha Christie murder investigation to add spice to the last act. It’s a hit-and-miss comic contraption with, unhappily, too many of the latter and too few of the former.
The set-up is familiar from “Downton”: as a smooth-toned narrator (Hayley Mills, cheekily listed as being “introduced” here) tells us, in 1931 opulent Fackham Hall (often derided by poorer folk with the obvious scurrilous mispronunciation) is in danger of passing, due to the practice of male-in primogeniture, from the family of dim-bulb Lord Humphrey and rigorously traditional Lady Prudence Davenport (Damian Lewis and Katherine Waterston) to a cousin of the Lord, since they are without a living son, all three of their boys having passed on. Their only hope is to marry their flighty daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) to the eldest surviving son of the Lord’s brother, boobish, arrogant, perpetually inept Archibald (Tom Felton), as Poppy’s sister Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) is considered, at twenty-three, over the hill and anyway boringly unattractive—though she’s not, of course.
Enter Eric Noone (Ben Radciffe), an orphan who’s become an expert conman and pickpocket despite having been brought up by nuns. He’s assigned to deliver a note to Lord Davenport, but along the way to the Hall his bicycle is hit by a car driven, without permission of course, by Rose, and both are hopelessly smitten. When he gets to the estate, he’s mistaken by head butler Cyril (Tim McMullan) as an applicant for the lowly position of hall boy, and is quickly hired, though the stern housekeeper (Anna Maxwell Martin) is hostile to him. But then she’s hostile to all the downstairs staff, except the Lord’s valet, apparently for family reasons.
Things get complicated when Poppy impulsively leaves Archibald at the altar for another, very unsuitable, man, and Rose is confronted with a proposal from her cousin even as she and Eric deepen their mutual interest. That plotline is interrupted, however, when a murder occurs and Inspector Watt (Tom Goodman-Hill) shows up to investigate, pocketing his extravagant, but fake, Poirot moustache before making everybody a suspect.
The murder is finally solved, but more importantly there’s an identity reveal that’s practically Dickensian, though the device goes back to Greco-Roman times, if not earlier.
The movie is chock full of idiocy—puerile jokes, loony sight gags, cartoonish characterizations, wacky twists—and it sporadically earns a chuckle, though rarely the outright laughs it’s aiming for. It certainly overdoes the scatological humor, as in a song called “I Went to the Palace” performed for the wedding guests by a fellow named Bert Chester (Adam Woodward)—modeled, presumably, on the Noël Coward appearance in the last “Downton” movie—that ends with a particularly gross example. And some of the ideas, like using Watt’s name for a variant on a classic Abbott & Costello sketch, fall very flat; so does the mention of first cousins routinely marrying among the aristocracy, which is announced even in the motto (“Incestus ad infinitum”) displayed on Fackham’s entrance gate. There are also too many tasteless visual jokes involving children.
Even when the ideas are good ones, they tend to be milked to excess. Take the pulpit orations of the Vicar (Jimmy Carr), who has what Sir Humphrey Appleby might call a punctuation problem, pausing his statements at precisely the wrong point to give his pronouncements offensive meanings before resuming to render them benign. The first time it happens, it’s amusing; but it’s repeated ad nauseam. The same is true of the running gag around wedding guest J.R.R. Tolkien (Jason Done), an officious sort constantly picking up ideas for his ever-in-the-works “Rings” books. First and second times, fine; further appearances tiresome.
Still, the entire cast throw themselves gamely into the tomfoolery, giving their all to even the weakest material although O’Hanlon’s direction, mimicking the lapidary style of his models, is very slow, with Colin Fair’s editing italicizing the gags mercilessly. The picture is, however, attractive to the eye. Exteriors at Knowsley Hall and Croxteth Hall outside Liverpool are impressive, and both the production design by Chris Richmond and Any Holden-Stokes and the costumes by Rosalind Ebbutt hit the mark; Philipp Blaubach’s cinematography is suitably lustrous, while Oli Julian contributes a jaunty score.
As the remake of “The Naked Gun” proved earlier this year, this spoofy genre is difficult to pull off in our less innocent age, and “Fackham Hall” shares that movie’s crudities, though not, thankfully, to the same extent. It’s mildly amusing and totally disposable, like a mediocre British sitcom.