Fackham Hall – A Rapid-Fire, Witty Takeoff on Downton That's Delightfully Ephemeral.
Maybe the feeling of uncertain days around us: subsequent to a lengthy span of quiet, the parody is making a resurgence. This summer saw the re-emergence of this playful category, which, when done well, skewers the grandiosity of pompously earnest genre with a flood of heightened tropes, sight gags, and ridiculously smart wordplay.
Frivolous eras, so it goes, create an appetite for knowingly unserious, gag-packed, welcome light amusement.
A Recent Offering in This Silly Trend
The latest of these silly send-ups arrives as Fackham Hall, a parody of Downton Abbey that pokes fun at the highly satirizable pretensions of gilded UK historical series. Penned in part by UK-Irish comic Jimmy Carr and helmed by Jim O'Hanlon, the film has plenty of source material to draw from and exploits every bit of it.
Opening on a absurd opening and culminating in a outrageous finale, this amusing upper-class adventure fills each of its 97 minutes with puns and routines running the gamut from the juvenile up to the authentically hilarious.
A Send-Up of Aristocrats and Servants
In the vein of Downton, Fackham Hall offers a pastiche of overly dignified rich people and excessively servile servants. The narrative centers on the hapless Lord Davenport (brought to life by a delightfully mannered Damian Lewis) and his literature-hating wife, Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston). After losing their children in a series of unfortunate mishaps, their aspirations now rest on finding matches for their daughters.
The younger daughter, Poppy (Emma Laird), has secured the family goal of an engagement to the right first cousin, Archibald (a wonderfully unctuous Tom Felton). Yet after she backs out, the onus falls upon the unmarried elder sister, Rose (Thomasin McKenzie), who is a "dried-up husk already and and possesses radically progressive ideas about women's independence.
Its Humor Succeeds
The spoof fares much better when joking about the stifling social constraints forced upon early 20th-century females – a topic often mined for po-faced melodrama. The trope of idealized ladylike behavior provides the richest material for mockery.
The narrative thread, as one would expect from a purposefully absurd spoof, is of lesser importance to the jokes. The writer delivers them coming at a consistently comedic pace. The film features a murder, a farcical probe, and a star-crossed attraction between the charming street urchin Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe) and Rose.
The Constraints of Frivolous Amusement
The entire affair is in lighthearted fun, however, this approach has limitations. The amplified foolishness of a spoof might grate after a while, and the entertainment value for this specific type diminishes at the intersection of a skit and a full-length film.
Eventually, you might wish to go back to a realm of (at least a modicum of) coherence. But, one must applaud a wholehearted devotion to this type of comedy. If we're going to amuse ourselves relentlessly, let's at least laugh at it.
