Producers: Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin Director: John Patton Ford Screenplay: John Patton Ford Cast: Glen Powell, Margaret Qualley, Jessica Henwick, Bill Camp, Zach Woods, Topher Grace, Raff Law, Bianca Amato, Sean Cameron Michael, Grady Wilson, Maggie Toomey, Nell Williams and Ed Harris Distributor: A24
Grade: C
If a screenwriter’s looking for inspiration, a classic Ealing comedy is an understandable temptation—provided one doesn’t mind the invidious comparisons that are bound to follow. Even the Coen brothers were undone in 2004 when they elected to remake Alexander Mackendrick’s delicious 1955 “The Ladykillers,” so it’s no surprise that John Patton Ford has come a-cropper with this take on Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel “Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal,” which Robert Hamer filmed so memorably as “Kind Hearts and Coronets” In 1949.
Setting aside the inevitable updating, Ford follows the trajectory of the book and earlier film quite closely. Mary Redfellow (Nell Williams), one of the children of billionaire Whitelaw (Ed Harris; the actor’s face is kept in shadow until the last act, but since his voice is a giveaway it’s pointless), falls for an impecunious cellist and gets pregnant. When the musician dies in the delivery room, Whitelaw demands that Mary give up the child or be disinherited. She refuses, and he’s as good as his word.
Mary takes an ordinary job and makes a home in New Jersey for her boy Becket (Grady Wilson), whom despite their financial straits she brings up with rarefied habits, paying for piano and archery lessons. In the course of them he meets, and falls for, little Julia Steinway (Maggie Toomey), who, though a trifle snooty, reciprocates. They part ways, however, when Mary dies and Becket is thrust into the foster care system.
Years later, played by Glen Powell, he’s on his own, working as a clerk in a New York men’s shop (think a little Brooks Brothers), and is embarrassed when Julia (Margaret Qualley) drops in to wait for her fiancé, a Wall Street financier. When Becket is unfairly transferred to the store’s warehouse to make room for a nepo hire, he’s infuriated, and plots to kill the seven relatives skedded to inherit Whitelaw’s fortune before he would.
In “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” all of the D’Acoynes targeted by the imperturbable Louis (Dennis Price) were played by Alec Guinness, in a delicious comic feat that helped make him a star. Here are the Redfellow roles are assigned to different actors, who can hardly make much of an impression in what for most amount to cameos. First up is Becket’s loathsome playboy cousin Taylor (Raff Law), whom he disposes of almost accidentally by tossing him overboard from his yacht while the lout’s in a drunken stupor. There’s an ancillary catch, though, since Becket meets Taylor’s father Warren (Bill Camp, giving the film’s most ingratiating performance) at the funeral and the older man, regretting how the family treated Mary, gives him a job in his financial firm.
The second victim is another cousin, Noah (Zach Woods), a boobish but pretentious photographer who signs one of his stills as “the white Basquiat.” Offing him brings Becket another benefit—a budding relationship with Noah’s erstwhile GF Ruth (Jessica Henwick), a down-to-earth sort who works as an elementary school teacher. By this time, however, Julia, now a sultry femme fatale, has shown up to ask Becket for a loan to prop up her husband’s failing business.
None of that, or the interest of a couple of clueless FBI investigators, stops Becket from moving on to another cousin, Steven (Topher Grace), the so-called pastor of a megachurch who specializes in fleecing his followers with motivational talks and bogus supplements. Then he moves on to his Aunt Cassandra (Bianca Amato) and Uncle McArthur (Sean Cameron Michael), who are disposed of in quick inserts. And what of Warren? Well, he’s a nice fellow to whom Becket has gotten attached, so he expires from an entirely natural heart attack.
Just as Becket seems home free, however, Julia returns with a threat to his safety, and to make matters more complicated, Whitelaw invites him for dinner on the very night of his engagement party. Since the film opens with Becket in jail awaiting execution—the entire film is cast as his “confession” to a priest—we know that things have unraveled for him, but “how” is the question, and Ford opts for a wildly over-the-top finale to replace the far more decorous one Horniman and Hamer offered. As to the coda, Ford doubles down on the cynicism, mirroring the original’s attitude about oligarchical rule but refashioned for the realities of today’s hyper-capitalist world.
The notion of resituating Horniman’s book in contemporary terms isn’t a bad one. The problem is that Ford’s reimagining isn’t satirically sharp enough; it comes across as bland and obvious. And while his film is mostly good-looking—Christian Huband’s production design and Todd Banhazi’s cinematography are good enough, thanks to strategically placed inserts, to obscure that it was shot in South Africa—as paced by Ford and edited by Harrison Atkins, until the explosive finale at the Redfellow mansion (where the repeated funerals at the family mausoleum, supposed to be a hilariously repetitive image, have already fallen flat), it just ambles along desultorily. Nor does Emile Mosseri’s score perk matters up.
The cast don’t either. Powell shows little of his vaunted star magnetism—whoever thought it was wise to fit him out in a ridiculous woolen cap in the early going?—and Qualley pushes the femme fatale business past the breaking point into tedium. Apart from Camp, no one else leaves much of a mark, though an almost unrecognizable Grace gives it the old college try; Harris goes full throttle in his single scene, but his character’s actions are among the most illogical aspects of a script that leaves too many holes unfilled.
The appropriate advice to anyone considering seeing “How To Make a Killing” is simply to watch “Kind Hearts and Coronets” instead, especially if you’ve never had the pleasure of enjoying that succulent cinematic bonbon of the Ealing brand.