Don't get me wrong. I like satire. I like an occasional broad easy-to-digest movie that's full of sight gags, pratfalls, and misunderstandings. They're like Tom Clancey books - no surprises and mind mulch for vacations.
I was to be disappointed.
The opening shot is a fancy car pulling through a big fancy gate to a big fancy house - Fackham Hall. Underneath that seems to be the family motto: "Incestus ad Infinitum" so yeah, it's gonna be broad humor and gutter humor.
Again, I can enjoy those if done well. Not everything has to be nuanced. The problem I had with this movie is that it never seemed to decide what it was going to skewer with the satire. They took a scattershot approach that left everything floating on the surface of truly beautiful sets - kind of like oil over a scenic pond. The pond is not improved by the oil nor was the manor house improved by the script.
I get it. It's satire. It's not supposed to be a literary masterpiece. But what I expect from a movie is some kind of coherency. That's where it falls very short. With their unfocused approach and habit of returning to jokes to the point of them being more eye rolling than amusing this movie, well, blows.
It has all the things they were looking to skewer - inbreeding in the aristocracy, the rebellious daughter, the runaway daughter, the obligatory "odd animals being shot out of the air", the requirement to marry a first cousin or the family is kicked out, the missing family member who lied about their age and ran off to fight in the war, the street urchin turned scoundrel, etc. There's so much of it that nothing comes into focus.
I'll give you the rundown, as much as I can remember it. I'm woefully behind on my movie reviews.
The scoundrel is given a job to deliver a letter to Fackham Hall. Yeah. In the affected accents you know exactly what that sounds like. The younger daughter is going to marry the first cousin to save the family. The older daughter refused to do it. The scoundrel is mistaken for someone applying for a houseboy type job and gets hired, without delivering the letter. The family member that lied about his age and went to the war is shown in flashbacks to be a toddler in an officer uniform. Ha ha, right?
Cue the scenes of sight gags racking up with the younger daughter running out of the church to go away with what seems to be the night soil collector, happily being treated like chattel, leaving the older daughter to marry for the sake of the family. The older daughter who has taken to the scoundrel, of course. The housekeeper takes a dim view of the whole thing. The father is murdered and the inspector comes in to figure it out. Or not. But it pushes up the urgency of marrying the first cousin.
The daughter has a roll in the hay with the scoundrel. The housekeeper sees them going into the barn. She decides to use that as a way to frame the scoundrel for the murder. The older daughter agrees to marry the cousin. The priest again (this is one place where they definitely went back to the same gag too many times when the priest reads the next word after a sentence to give it a whole new naughty meaning, then corrects himself) starts the marriage.
The scoundrel gets away because the police officer happens to be someone he met in the pub he took the oldest daughter to prior to the barn situation. He does get arrested, reads the letter, and finds out he's the older brother of the cousin. Cue farcical jail escape during the wedding. The housekeeper blocks him and relates what really happened to the father - a series of stupidly done actual accidents that ended up killing him (he fell onto the letter opener to stab himself, etc.) but he gets past. The two of them get married. All is sweetness and roses.
Of course she still married her cousin. In the credits where they show how each family member ended up the younger sister bucked tradition by marrying a SECOND cousin. Hilarious.
I wanted to like the movie. I was ready to give it a very fair chance. However they made it impossible to do so by, well, making a bad movie.
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