Sometimes more is more.
Fackham Hall seems, at first, like another British period film with butlers and countryside vistas and daughters of the house gazing longingly at hunky working-class men. And then there’s a pratfall, a fart joke, or a glimpse of a man in a panda bear costume in a stately drawing room. Say the name of the movie with a bit of a cockney accent and you’ll get a good attitude here—throw everything against the wall, from dense, surrealistic running gags to dirty puns. With this spray-of-bullets approach, everyone has a laugh eventually.
With a joke density akin to a neutron star, Fackham Hall’s five credited screenwriters do find time for a glimmer of a story within the farce, which I suppose one could call the Airplane! of Downton Abbey. Ben Radcliffe stars as Eric Noone (that’s “no one”), an orphan who turns up at an English estate, home of the Davenports, and is mistaken for the newest houseboy. Within no time, he’s made contact with the lovely Rose Davenport (Thomasin McKenzie), and the two seem eager to find middle ground between upstairs and downstairs.
While there has been no shortage of BBC dramas that have mined this territory, few have done so with a dedication to stupidity like Fackham Hall. Poking fun at the aristocracy is a time-honored British tradition, and this movie sinks its teeth in with gusto. Damian Lewis is particularly amusing as Lord Davenport, a pampered (and inbred) blue blood who uses servants like human furniture. Tom Felton is also terrific as the obnoxious cousin who is looking for some similar-DNA love.
All the major set pieces you could expect are featured, like a fox hunt, a visit from a Noël Coward-esque songsmith, a surreptitious visit to a pub, a murder mystery, World War I flashbacks, and tiny bits of business happening in the back of the frame that you may not catch on the first viewing. (One zing I found particularly sublime was spotting the ubiquitous 1990s Trainspotting poster in what amounts to a servant’s dorm room.)
Should I ever watch Fackham Hall a second time I’ll grab a scorecard to see if there are more jokes about farting or wanking. (I think wanking may have the edge; both bodily acts involve people plummeting to the ground as a result of their severity.) This is childish and immature, but director Jim O’Hanlon ensured a strict discipline with his cast and production designers. Everything is played incredibly straight. The interiors are luxurious, the camera movements are lush, and there is no fourth-wall winking in anyone’s performance.
This level of sewn-up tightness stands in strict contrast to the Judd Apatow-style of comedy that’s dominated the field of late. Not to say those movies aren’t funny, but the “let’s riff on something until we hit something” philosophy clearly does not suffice at Fackham Hall! One can see (and I’m actually being serious here) that a great deal of discipline and care went into this movie… a movie where giant stags fall out of the sky and the local priest constantly — constantly — misreads the punctuation in his sermons to make them as filthy and sophomoric as possible.
What’s great about Fackham Hall, especially as a “holiday time” movie, is that anyone who buys a ticket can’t lose. Either you like it (and you should!) and you have a good time, or you hate it (booo!), but you get to razz whoever dragged you to it for the rest of your days. “Oh, no, I’m not letting you pick the movie! Remember that stupid Downton Abbey parody with all the farting?! I can’t believe you thought that was funny!” A visit to Fackham deserves to be part of your family lore.
