A while back, I finally sat down to watch Dracula: Dead and Loving It. I was curious to see the dud that effectively ended the legendary filmmaking career of Mel Brooks, and see what made it so famously inferior. Well, for those who’ve never seen it (which is probably most of you, I’d wager), I can tell you why.
You see, despite being made and marketed as a parody, Dracula: Dead and Loving It was built and structured as a straightforward retelling of the classic Bram Stoker tale. And literally everything about that story hinges on selling Dracula as an unstoppable and irresistible force of unholy evil. Yet here’s Mel Brooks doing his best to tell the exact same story with Leslie Nielsen portraying Dracula as a hapless clumsy dolt. Square peg, round hole.
Contrast this with Mel Brooks in his prime. The way he used humor to mock Nazis in The Producers. How he roasted racists and politicians in Blazing Saddles. Hell, in Young Frankenstein, he lampooned scientific arrogance and willful ignorance in equal measure. Even in his later years, Robin Hood: Men in Tights told jokes that (for the most part) made Robin Hood look more absurdly awesome while making everyone else look dumber by comparison.
Yes, Brooks has an extraordinary gift at repurposing quirks and tropes to deconstruct and poke fun at particular genres and movies. But Brooks isn’t just a master of parody, he’s a bona fide satirist. Back in his prime (and possibly now, depending on how Spaceballs 2 works out), Brooks was a genius at using comedy to make a point, by reinforcing how stupid or self-defeating or awesome certain characters — and thus certain viewpoints — are. Contrast that with the team of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker, whose cinematic works of parody are no less funny, but much less focused. Z/A/Z was always more interested on being irreverent than being satirical.
When I say that Fackham Hall is less like Z/A/Z and more like something that Mel Brooks would’ve made in his prime, this is what I’m talking about.
Fackham Hall comes to us from comedian Jimmy Carr and his brother Patrick, both of whom wrote the script with help from the British comedy team of Dawson Bros. In the director’s chair is Jim O’Hanlon, a journeyman TV director. But of course it’s the cast that’s the big draw here. Damian Lewis. Thomasin McKenzie. Tom Felton. Katherine Waterston. The legendary Hayley Mills on voiceover narration. And those are just the big names — this cast is stacked with all sorts of dramatic/comedic talent, every one of whom can and will carry a straight-faced joke as far as possible.
We lay our scene in the eponymous Fackham Hall, circa 1931. For the past four centuries, the enormous mansion and surrounding land have been lovingly kept by the wealthy Davenport family of aristocrats. Unfortunately, while the family patriarch (Lord Davenport, played by Lewis) previously had four sons, all four are now dead of various comical reasons I won’t repeat here.
The bottom line is that in the absence of a direct male heir, Lord Davenport’s nephew (Archibald, played by Felton) is next in line to inherit Fackham Hall. Which means that Lord Davenport’s eldest daughter (Poppy, played by Emma Laird) must marry her first cousin to keep control over the estate. But then Poppy leaves Archibald at the altar and spontaneously runs away to marry a manure farmer. Yes, you read that correctly.
Enter Eric Noone (pronounced “no-one”), played by Ben Radcliffe. He’s an orphan and an expert pickpocket, having grown up as a street urchin under the care of certain morally flexible nuns. Long story short, Eric flukes his way into a menial housekeeping job at Fackham Hall and gets into a meet-cute with Rose (McKenzie), the younger Davenport daughter.
So now Rose is stuck in a love triangle between Eric and Archibald. She could follow her heart and marry the handsome and charming young pauper, or she could marry the wealthy asshole (who’s also her first cousin, remember) and keep her family from getting evicted and bankrupt. It’s a complicated situation, even further complicated by Lord Davenport’s murder at the halfway point.
In summary, what we’ve got here is a spoof of British soap operas and costume dramas. Though of course the filmmakers can’t resist putting in the occasional sight gag about modern pop culture. Most of the modern jokes involve musicians, for some reason — a Taylor Swift joke is a particular highlight, and there’s a DJ Khaled joke that got me laughing out loud. And then we’ve got Cyril (Tim McMullan), the butler deliberately written and performed as a living embodiment of Siri.
That said, it should come as little surprise that most of the pop culture jokes involve British culture. I was especially fond of the long-winded death speech comprised of Beatles song titles. And I’d be remiss not to mention Jason Done, here playing a heightened depiction of J.R.R. Tolkien himself, pre-Hobbit.
All of that aside, I don’t want to focus overmuch on the anachronistic humor, as the jokes about modern pop culture are subtle and far between. No, what really matters here is the class humor.
From start to finish, this movie is all about relentlessly mocking the wealthy British elite, those snobbish self-important idiots too far out of touch and up their own asses to realize what fools they are. Sure, the commoners get brutally lampooned as well, but at least they’re in on the joke. As a direct result, the film skewers the socioeconomic tropes and pompous political drama of the British soap opera genre while also making pointed statements about class disparity. It all works exquisitely well.
A few supporting characters deserve particular mention. There’s Mrs. McAllister (Anna Maxwell Martin), a markedly less comical character, serving a clear and exclusive purpose as a servant who knowingly and directly works to protect her livelihood by upholding the system that oppresses her. (Getting back to the Mel Brooks comparison, she’s in the same class as Frau Blucher of Young Frankenstein). We’ve also got the Vicar (Jimmy Carr himself) who skewers the Catholic Church by misreading his own sermons. He’s a one-joke character, but the one joke is superbly executed and stops just short of wearing out its welcome.
Oh, and we’ve got Erin Austen on hand, playing the genre-requisite catty female supporting characters. Literally all the twin sisters do is fawn over Archibald, competing with Rose and each other for the wealthy eligible bachelor to marry. They’re called the Bechdel Sisters. Ha ha.
The plot to this movie is aggressively simple, based on a cellophane love triangle that plays out pretty much exactly as anyone with two working brain cells would expect. Even the “murder mystery” in the back half barely deserves to be called a mystery, and it only exists to throw more complications into the love triangle. Though it also helps to parody another genre of British costume drama, complete with Tom Goodman-Hill as our eccentric Inspector Watt.
On the other hand, such an aggressively simple plot means we get more room for jokes and wordplay and sight gags. Almost all of which are directly or indirectly geared toward examining themes of class disparity through Rose’s dilemma between the street urchin and the rich asshole. Even better, while this is all clearly a spoof, our three romantic leads expertly play their jokes totally straight. Rose, Eric, and Archibald are all given so much screen time, all performed with such stellar romantic and comedic chemistry, there are multiple scenes in which they honestly register as characters with two or more dimensions.
But of course it’s a spoof, so even the most sincere romantic moments are undercut with poop jokes.
Fackham Hall is a tough film to analyze — as a spoof, the film deconstructs itself by its very nature. And of course I’ve already given away more of the jokes and punchlines than I would’ve preferred. All I can really say is that I was laughing from start to finish. The jokes are all impeccably crafted, everyone in the cast came to play, and the film is razor-sharp in poking fun at socioeconomic inequalities in fact and fiction. This one gets a strong recommendation.