Fackham Hall – This Fast-Paced, Humorous Downton Abbey Spoof That's Refreshingly Ephemeral.
Perhaps the sense of end times in the air: following a long period of quiet, the parody is making a comeback. The recent season saw the re-emergence of this unserious film style, which, at its best, skewers the grandiosity of pompously earnest genre with a barrage of heightened tropes, visual jokes, and ridiculously smart wordplay.
Playful periods, it seems, beget self-awarely frivolous, joke-dense, refreshingly shallow amusement.
A Recent Entry in This Silly Wave
The latest of these silly send-ups comes in the form of Fackham Hall, a Downton Abbey spoof that needles the highly satirizable pretensions of gilded English costume epics. The screenplay comes from UK-Irish comic Jimmy Carr and directed by Jim O'Hanlon, the movie finds ample of inspiration to mine and uses all of it.
Starting with a ludicrous start to a outrageous finale, this amusing aristocratic caper crams every one of its 97 minutes with jokes and bits running the gamut from the childish all the way to the authentically hilarious.
A Send-Up of Upstairs, Downstairs
In the vein of Downton, Fackham Hall offers a pastiche of overly dignified aristocrats and excessively servile servants. The plot focuses on the hapless Lord Davenport (portrayed by a wonderfully pretentious Damian Lewis) and his anti-reading wife, Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston). Having lost their four sons in a series of calamitous events, their plans fall upon marrying off their daughters.
The younger daughter, Poppy (Emma Laird), has achieved the aristocratic objective of a promise to marry the appropriate kinsman, Archibald (an impeccably slimy Tom Felton). But after she withdraws, the burden transfers to the single elder sister, Rose (Thomasin McKenzie), who is a "dried-up husk at 23 and who harbors unladylike ideas about female autonomy.
The Film's Laughs Works Best
The spoof fares much better when satirizing the suffocating norms imposed on pre-war females – an area frequently explored for po-faced melodrama. The archetype of idealized womanhood supplies the most fertile material for mockery.
The narrative thread, as is fitting for an intentionally ridiculous send-up, takes a back seat to the bits. Carr delivers them arriving at a pleasantly funny rate. The film features a killing, a bungled inquiry, and a star-crossed attraction involving the plucky thief Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe) and Rose.
Limitations and Frivolous Amusement
It's all in the spirit of playful comedy, though that itself imposes restrictions. The amplified absurdity characteristic of the genre may tire over time, and the entertainment value on this particular variety runs out in the space between sketch and feature.
At a certain point, one may desire to go back to stories with (at least a modicum of) reason. Yet, you have to admire a genuine dedication to this type of comedy. In an age where we might to amuse ourselves to death, let's at least see the funny side.
