Fackham Hall a Hilarious Parody of Downton Abbey

FACKHAM HALL (2025)

Directed by Jim O’Hanlon

Bleeker Street, 97 minutes, R (language, crude humor, language, innuendo)

★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Assuming you’re not one of those Downton Abbey fans that is so enamored that you can brook no criticism of it, Fackham Hall is a must-see satire. It’s a silly venture into lowbrow humor that’s akin to watching an old Henny Youngman performance, meaning that you will laugh yourself stupid despite thinking you shouldn’t. Think Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs crossed with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Airplane and you’re on the right track. You’d not be wrong to assume a backhand slap at Julian Fellowes, the aristocracy-loving British writer who reminds me of Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” sketch. I’ve not laughed so hard at a comedy film in years.

 

We meet young pickpocket Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe)–read “no one”–plying his craft on a London Street before ducking into his Catholic orphanage. A nun hands him a letter and offers him money to deliver it to Fackham Hall. After conning her into giving him a full British pound, he bicycles on his way before being smashed into by a car driven by Rose Fackham (Thomasin McKenzie). Watch how he parks his broken bike. I should mention that you should pay attention to everything in this film: things in the background, posters on the wall, road signs…. Even the video box bears the slogan, “Born to Aristocracy. Bred for Idiocy.” The gates to Fackham Hall proclaim incestus ad infinitum. One might suppose the Davenport family patriarch Lord Humphrey Davenport (Damian Lewis) is the dimmest bulb in the socket, but that would be shortsighted. He and his wife Lady Prudence (Katherine Waterson) are obsessed with marrying eldest daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) to a cousin who’s not too closely related as to invalidate the marriage. That’s because their three sons were lost in World War I, as we find out from hilarious scrapbook clippings. Also lost was Cousin Nathaniel “who was just a boy” when he too was lost. (We see him as a child in the trenches banging grenades together!) His mother Rose (Hayley Mills!), who narrates the film has spent the years since the war as a sourpuss crank.

 

There is, naturally, house staff. The butler Cyril (Jim McMullen) is a stiff who is a spot-on sendup of Downton’s Mr. Carter, and Mrs. Edna McAllister (Anne Maxwell) sort of channels Mrs. Hughes—if she had been vaccinated with a meanness serum. The vicar (Jimmy Carr) called upon to marry Poppy to the only eligible Davenport nitwit available, Cousin Archibald (Tom Felton), comes close to stealing the comedy script and running away with it via his act of saying aloud what’s in his subconscious before correcting himself by looking at the actual words from the wedding ritual! And what’s a wedding without loads of toff guests? There is Darvish Khalid (Ramon Tikaram) who acquired a limp during the war, but not for the reasons you would think; J. R. R. Tolkien (Jason Done), who has been working on The Hobbit for many years, has learned to speak Orc, and invites everyone to call him, “J.R.R. Tolkien, the Writer;” Bill Bobaggins, who is in love with his donkey, and whose name is among the many things Tolkien appropriates; plus, more people surnamed Davenport than one can imagine. As Poppy and Archie are about to be married, Poppy runs from the church and into the arms of the man she truly loves, a cut straight out of The Graduate. He’s a (night-)soiled bum who operates the local dung wagon. (As we find out later, Archie’s one of 22 times Poppy goes to the altar without getting married!) Poppy was probably right about Archie, though; he makes Lord Humphrey look like Einstein. But Lady Davenport–think Cora Crawley– is desperate to keep Fackham Hall in the family and begins to browbeat younger daughter Rose to marry Archie. In keeping with the Downton parody, Rose is deeply in love with Eric, who plays a Tom Branson/Artful Dodger mashup.

 

Things become a sticky wicket when Lord Humphrey is indeed killed–Archie almost did so in the obligatory “hunting” scene–and Inspector Watt appears to solve the crime and provide fodder for an Abbott and Costello routine. Will all eventually be tea and cakes among the twits? This is one of my favorite five-star terrible movies!

 

Rob Weir

The Snowman a Chilling Novel to Read as Winter Lurks

 

 

 

 

 

THE SNOWMAN (2007)

By Jo Nesbø

Knopf, 512 pages

★★★★

 

  

 

 

Get ready for it, faithful blog readers. I’ve been at the League of Women Voters annual used book sale and came back with a large bag filled with novels of favorite authrors and books I wanted to read years ago but was too busy to get to them. Older books are still good books!

 

I have read several Harry Hole mysteries from Norwegian author Jo(n) Nesbø. Hole might put you in mind of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch in the sense that both work on “cold cases,” serious crimes that were never solved. Both are prone to drinking too much, don’t suffer fools gladly, and have been unlucky in love. Harry Hole is also suspected of being out-of-touch with modern police methods and impossible to manage, hence he’s on everyone’s potential firing list whenever police screwup and the need arises to feed the media or public officials a scapegoat. Hole’s ace in the hole–so to speak–is that he is the only investigator in Norwegian history to have solved a serial killer case. (Being Norway, not the USA, that’s a short list!)

 

Several things rock Harry’s world. First, Katrine Bratt transfers into his cold case group in Oslo. She’s bright, beautiful, and from Bergen, which likes to forget that Oslo is the capital. Bratt exudes an inapproachable iciness and a whiff of (perhaps dangerous) ambition. She’s allegedly married, but seems to be coming on to Harry. Second, Harry’s ex-wife Rakel Fauke whose son Oleg looks upon Harry as a fatherly role model though biologically, he’s from a Russian dalliance before Harry or her current husband. Harry’s heavy drinking is partially linked to Rakel, the great love of Harry’s life who got away. She’s been cheating on husband # 2–with Harry–though she claims she only wants his sexual prowess. (They are Scandinavians, so what can I tell you?) Third, Harry’s drinking makes him seem even more of a dinosaur, something that young homicide cop Magnus Skarre occasionally spills in discussions with Harry’s boss Gunnar Hager. Harry’s always a step or two ahead of them, but he knows his head is on the chopping block.

 

Speaking of which, the first snow of the year leads Harry and Katrine into a missing persons case. Strange noises outside lead Birte Becker to investigate. Her husband is at a meeting, Birte tells her son Jonas to stay inside, and that’s the last she is seen. Did she run away? Unlikely as her pink scarf suddenly appears on the snowman they built and her cellphone is missing. When the ring leads Harry to the snowman, something more ominous is clearly afoot. If there is any doubt, Sylvia Ottersen, the mother of twins, also disappears. Police scouring the woods behind her barn make a gruesome discovery: Sylvia’s severed head upon a snowman’s body. Harry suspects a serial killer and Katrine unearths a pattern of disappearances of women with children 24 years into the past, always at the first snowfall.

 

Don’t be put off by the heft of The Snowman; it’s a twisty mystery with more suspects than a campout of patrons waiting for the mall to open on Black Friday. Several doctors are on Harry’s list, as is a missing Bergen cop, an obnoxious TV host who runs a prostitution ring, and Katrine. Questions abound. Why kill mothers? Why are doctors quiet about their research into rare medical conditions? Why haven’t crime scene forensics found more blood? What’s the significance of the killer’s MO (modus operandi)?

 

I found this novel both gripping and creepy. Perhaps it could have benefitted from judicious editing, as its pattern of “fingering” the wrong person as the Snowman wrong wears thin. Red herrings are standard in mysteries, and there’s always the possibility that the translation into English is to blame, but the quarter of the novel is, at once, thrilling and ragged. It sometimes seems that Nesbø stitched unused ideas into this novel. Two nearly fatal standoffs add tension, but steer The Snowman into adventure-story territory. It might not be a perfect mystery, but you will go through it like loose snow. It’s also far superior to the film made in 2017, which is hard to find, so warm up the cider and hunker down.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Eleanor the Great, or Eleanor the Pretty Good?

 

 

 

 

 

 

ELEANOR THE GREAT (2025)

Directed by Scarlett Johansson

Sony Pictures Classic, 98 minutes, PG-13 (language, inferences)

★★★

 

June Squibb’s later-in-life career was resurrected when she appeared in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska in 2013. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress and has been in demand ever since. Some have dismissed her as a sort of Betty White Lite, though Ms. Squibb’s career has been far more substantive. White died at age 99 in 2021, so perhaps it’s time to crown Squibb as the queen of defying ageism, though she prefers pricking its hide with satirical barbs. At the same time, though, questions persist whether she lampoons ageism, or merely supplanted assumptions that the elderly are senile with stereotypes of comical cranks and rebels.

 

Scarlett Johansson made her directing debut in Eleanor the Great with June Squibb in the titular role. She plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a 94-year-old Jewish woman who has returned to New York City (from Florida) because her best friend and roommate Bessie Stern (Rita Zohar) has died. Shall we say that her new roommate, her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht), is all the things Bessie was not: pushy, frantic, judgmental, and a terrible listener. Eleanor quickly surmises that Lisa is too busy to pay attention to her, a truth reinforced in flashback sequences in which Bessie pours out her Holocaust survivor’s guilt and pain. Lisa wants her mother to go to the local Jewish Community Center in the belief that it’s simply a benign holding cell for old Jews. (For the record, Ms. Squibb is Jewish, having converted when she married Charles Kakatsakis in 1959.) In a classic screw up, Eleanor accidentally wanders into a support group for Holocaust survivors and, when pushed to speak, appropriates Bessie’s stories as her own, a  feeble and misguided attempt to feel as if she belongs.

 

Eleanor’s moving story–it’s not hers, but her mind is obviously sharp enough to remember and recreate what Bessie told her–makes her an instant celebrity among the group. It also catches the ear of Nina Davis (Erin Kellyman), a college journalism student working through grief of her own; her mother has recently died and she has lost her moorings. Analogous to Lisa, Nina’s father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a successful-but-harried news anchor. Despite gaps of age, religion, race, and experiences Eleanor and Nina become close friends. In Nina’s eyes, the world-wise Eleanor becomes a mother substitute.

 

All is well until Nina wishes to profile Eleanor for a class project. Eleanor plays her assumed role so well that Nina’s father wants to profile Eleanor for a news story. Nina is hurt as dear old dad is stealing her story and Eleanor reluctantly agrees to go on the air. As generally happens in movies and in life, the bigger the lie, the deeper the hurt, humiliation, anger, and psychological damage is left in the exposure wake.

 

The problem with a story such as this is how to end it. Johannson wiggles out of it, but only in a sort of way that leaves her open to accusations of schmaltz, romanticism, and contrivance. Each is a valid interpretation of Eleanor the Great. Johannson came in for criticism–some of it unkind. I wonder, though, if the larger problem lies in the genre often tagged comedy-drama. It’s hard to laugh your way out of cultural misappropriation, as many have found out when caught lying about combat experiences, family pedigrees, academic honors, or in the case of ex-Congressman George Santos just about everything! Johannsson and script writer Tory Kamen opted for a soft landing that is sentimental in a mawkish way. Isn’t this a circumstance that calls for drama, not smiles and fluff?

 

For all of this, Eleanor the Great ranks at the top end of so-so movies. Squibb is a portrait of being conflicted but naïve, Kellyman is moving as a broken-hearted not-quite-a-woman, and Ejiofor is convincing as the kind of newsman who eats nails for breakfast. In other words, they work well together because each is distinct. I’m not surprised that most critics found it hard to whip up enthusiasm for the movie, or that the box office was less than $5 million. But if we lash our swords to the wall above the fireplace, Eleanor the Great can be seen as Eleanor the Pretty Good.

 

Rob Weir