Perhaps it’s the feeling of end times in the air: after years of inactivity, spoofs are making a comeback. This summer saw the resurgence of the lighthearted genre, which at its best sends up the pretensions of overly serious genre with a barrage of pitched cliches, sight gags and stupid-clever puns. The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a spoof of a buddy-cop spoof, opened to moderate box office success; the hapless rock band dialed it back up to 11 in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Reboots of the horror spoof gold-standard Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars rip Spaceballs were greenlit, and there were rumors of a return for international man of mystery Austin Powers. Unserious times, it seems, beget appetite for knowingly unserious, joke-dense, refreshingly shallow fun.
The latest of these goofy parodies, which premieres on the beyond-parody day that Fifa awarded Donald Trump an inaugural peace prize and Netflix announced its plan to buy Warner Bros, is Fackham Hall, a Downton Abbey spoof that pokes at the very pokeable pretensions of gilded British period dramas. (Yes, Fackham rhymes with a crass kiss-off to the aristocracy.) Co-written by British Irish comedian and TV presenter Jimmy Carr and directed by Jim O’Hanlon, Fackham Hall has plenty of material to work with – the historical soap’s grand finale just premiered in September, 15 years after Julian Fellowes’s series started going upstairs-downstairs with ludicrous portent – and wastes none of it. From ludicrous start (servants rolling joints for the household and responding to calls from the “masturbatorium”) to ludicrous finish (someone manages to marry a second cousin rather than a first!), this enjoyable silver-spoon romp packs all of its 97 minutes with jokes and bits ranging from the puerile to the genuinely funny, proving that there may yet be more to wring from eat-the-rich satire.
Like Downton, Fackham Hall is a pastiche of very self-important rich people and very obsequious servants, of effete masculinity and feminine gamesmanship. What is life as a British aristocrat, if not to drink tea and scheme others’ marriages? Having lost their four sons in four separate tragic accidents, the feckless Lord Davenport (an enjoyably affected Damian Lewis) and his anti-reading wife, Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston), are left to focus on their daughters. Poppy (Emma Laird), the younger sister, has accomplished the family goal of finding the right first cousin to marry, lest the manor drift out of family control. But when Poppy bails on a future of know-nothing conversation with cousin Archibald (a perfectly smarmy Tom Felton) for a simpleton, the family’s hopes land on the unmarried Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) – at 23, a “dried-up husk of a woman”, according to her mother – whose belief in such things as female autonomy leads her to detest Archibald.
Carr fares much better joking about the suffocating expectations on early 20th-century women often mined for self-serious drama – poor Rose just wants to read books (the scandal!) in but One Shade of Grey – than joking about women, as in his disastrous recent standup. The trope of respectable, enviable femininity are the stars here, and often make for the best punching bags; when plucky pickpocket Eric Noone (the dashing Ben Radcliffe), hand-selected from his London orphanage by a mysterious stranger to deliver a letter to Fackham, collides into Rose, he is inevitably sidetracked by an “incredibly beautiful woman with a kind of carefree essence that makes men grateful to be alive!”
As befitting an intentionally ridiculous spoof, the plot is secondary to the bits, which Carr keeps delivering at an amiably humorous clip, with a solid three guffaws in the mix. There is a murder, and an incompetent investigation. The forbidden romance between Noone (pronounced “no one”) and Rose, played by Radcliffe and McKenzie as just the right balance of bumbling and beguiling, imperils the aristocrats’ best-laid plans. Genre skewering, pratfalls and spoof-staple wordplay abound. (“I’m here for the murder,” says the investigator (Tom Goodman-Hill). “I’m afraid someone’s already done it! But come in anyway,” says the butler.)
It’s all in lighthearted fun, though that itself has limitations. The dialed-up silliness of a spoof can wear quickly, and the mileage on this particular variety runs out somewhere between sketch and feature. At a certain point, you might wish to return to the world of (very slight) reason. But you have to respect a sincere commitment to the artform – if we’re going to amuse ourselves to death, might as well laugh at it.
Fackham Hall is out in US cinemas now, in the UK on 12 December and in Australia on 19 February
