Movies
David Bowie once admitted in a song to being afraid of
Americans, but it’s the English that have me worried. If we’re to believe
movies like Niall Johnson’s grey comedy (not too light, not too dark) Keeping
Mum, it’s like Old New Jersey over there, with little old ladies
solving their problems via genteel whacking. Apparently it’s not all Stilton
and shuttlecocks as previously assumed, and the quaint ponds of the English
countryside are positively silly with corpses.
Dame Maggie Smith (late of the Harry Potter juggernaut) slums only slightly to star as Grace
Hawkins, a housekeeper who has traveled to the impossibly lovely parish of
Little Wallop (population 57…and falling) to keep the house of the vicar and
his wife. Walter Goodfellow (Rowan Atkinson, still bumbling) is the humorless
man of the cloth, oblivious to the fact that his leggy daughter is a teenage
slattern and his pretty son is a bully magnet. He’s also completely unaware
that his wife Gloria (the sorely missed Kristin Scott Thomas, The English Patient) is planning to run
off with her icky golf instructor (Patrick Swayze?!). None of this goes
unnoticed by Grace, who tackles the issues of the day by brandishing shovels,
bolt cutters, and steam irons against the family’s perceived tormentors and
whose real reason for being in the Goodfellow home is clear to anyone who… well,
anyone.
Scripted by American novelist Richard Russo (Empire Falls), Keeping Mum is as predictable a movie as you’re likely to see this
year (save the final shot, possibly), but it does offer the opportunity to see
three of England’s finest in one fell swoop. The peerless Smith allows her
disapproving mouth to telegraph who will next be sleeping with the blue algae,
and Atkinson, while in no way stretching, does enjoy a heavenly scene in which
he rereads the Bible’s “Song of Solomon” with a new set of eyes (not literally,
just to be clear). Thomas hasn’t been seen much since 2001’s Gosford Park, and she puts her frosty
smolder to good use as the conflicted Gloria, desperate for her husband’s
attention and ripe for the picking by the dehydrated-apple-faced Swayze,
furiously chowing on the scenery as though he was being menaced by an elderly
Englishwoman.
Sure, I watched a bunch of movies about alternative
lifestyles over the last couple of weeks, but nothing I previewed for ImageOut
came close to being as gay as Jackass: Number Two. Attempted anal
penetration, homoerotic branding, a swig of semen, naked men on top of each
other, and an old-fashioned Hollywood musical number are just a few of the
highlights of the second big-screen edition of Jackass, which also features the death-defying idiocy and
hilariously stealthy junk-thwacking we have all come to love. It’s not as funny
as the first Jackass flick, but it’s
sometimes hard to muster up more quality material after the initial release.
That’s OK; it happens to a lot of guys.
Keeping Mum (R), directed by Niall Johnson, is coming soon to
the Little Theatres | Jackass: Number Two (R), directed by
Jeff Tremaine, is playing everywhere imaginable.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2006.
