Dec 6, 2025 11:18am PT
The historical romantic costume drama is an ideal target for parody. This one is amusing enough, but the jokes land mostly in the light chuckle zone.
Courtesy of Bleecker Street
The title of “Fackham Hall,” an “Airplane!”-style spoof of what used to be called the Merchant Ivory or “Masterpiece Theater” genre (now it’s the “Downton Abbey” genre), sounds vaguely naughty, even if you can’t quite put your finger on why. That’s because the joke only comes alive when it’s pronounced with a Cockney accent, by one of the film’s lowly characters from the servant class. Then it comes out as *“Fuck ’em all!” *I would say…
Dec 6, 2025 11:18am PT
The historical romantic costume drama is an ideal target for parody. This one is amusing enough, but the jokes land mostly in the light chuckle zone.
Courtesy of Bleecker Street
The title of “Fackham Hall,” an “Airplane!”-style spoof of what used to be called the Merchant Ivory or “Masterpiece Theater” genre (now it’s the “Downton Abbey” genre), sounds vaguely naughty, even if you can’t quite put your finger on why. That’s because the joke only comes alive when it’s pronounced with a Cockney accent, by one of the film’s lowly characters from the servant class. Then it comes out as *“Fuck ’em all!” *I would say that qualifies as half-funny, in addition to being pointedly juvenile and…well, half-funny is better than no funny at all. “Fackham Hall” is that kind of movie. I was primed to like it, because I’ve sat through this genre for decades, with its grand manners and well-worn “prestige” tropes, to the point that it’s become an ideal target for parody. The historical romantic costume drama is, by now, a cinematic china shop that demands a bull.
This one tosses some amusing spitballs. As we approach the front gate of Fackham Hall, a ridiculously oversize British country mansion in 1931, where the aristocratic Davenport family presides, we notice the inscription: “Incestus ad Infinitum.” That will prove to be one of the film’s wittier running gags — that everyone in this rarefied world marries their first or second cousin, because that’s the only way to keep the wealth in the family. At one point, the following courtly come-on is offered: “You are the most beautiful Davenport sister currently available.” And those sisters, radiant Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) and flaky Poppy (Emma Laird), have a job to do, which is to marry the right cousin, who will keep them living in the luxury of Fackham Hall.
In what plays like an homage to Spinal Tap’s drummers, the Davenport brothers have all died (their names, by the way, are John, Paul, George, and Ringo). And after Poppy runs out at the altar from her impending marriage to Archibald (Tom Felton), who is that perfectly unctuous, dull, but well-positioned family heir (in a real movie he’d be played by the young Jonathan Pryce), it’s up to Rose to marry him. But she only has eyes for Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe), pronounced “Eric No One,” the dashing grown-up Cockney orphan who arrives at the estate to deliver a fateful letter and winds up staying on as an assistant.
“Fackham Hall,” directed by Jim O’Hanlon from a grab-bag-of-jokes script by five writers (Steve Dawson, Andrew Dawson, Tim Inman, Jimmy Carr, and Patrick Carr,), is one of those parodies that does a scrupulous job of recreating the world it’s parodying. I generally think that makes a spoof funnier, but in this case the tone is so restrained that most of the jokes don’t fully detonate. They land, when they do at all, in the light chuckle zone.
I chuckled at Damian Lewis, who plays it straight as Lord Fackham, a stuffed shirt with a twinkle of clueless entitlement in his eye, and I chuckled at Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston) talking about how her daughter is a dried-up, over-the-hill spinster…because she’s all of 23. I chuckled at the hunting party that turns into a Dick Cheney debauch of friendly fire, and at Rose reading a novel entitled “One Shade of Gray.” And I chuckled at the presence, during a Fackham Hall party, of J.R.R. Tolkien (Jason Done), who keeps scribbling away at some obscure manuscript and getting names and phrases for it from whatever the folks around him are saying.
But here’s the odd thing about “Fackham Hall.” A number of the gag are rippingly obscene, the overarching impulse being to punch through the polite surface of the “Downton Abbey” genre with R-rated sex guffaws. But even these have a way of landing gently. If you watch “Airplane!” or the movie that’s the “Citizen Kane” of the ZAZ genre, “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” (and you really should, given that Variety just chose it, quite rightly, as the #1 comedy of all time), you’ll see that there’s a spirit of obstreperous aggression at work in those films. Nearly every joke lands with an anarchic bounce that you can trace all the way from vaudeville to the stoned ’70s.
Not all great comedy is aggressive, but the ZAZ genre almost needs to be. Whereas “Fackham Hall,” even when it features a drawing-room performance of a song entitled “I Went to the Palace With My Willie Hanging Out!” (and then a digitally scrambled shot of the piano player’s willie), exerts the sort of harmless frivolity that last summer’s “Naked Gun” remake did. The movie, in its mud-on-the-doily way, is amusing enough to get by. But it never shocks you into laughter.