Isn’t it always the way that the films which are the least heralded are so often the best? My review earlier this week of the wonderful current release, Kenny, brought to mind a similar experience some months ago. The film in question was Keeping Mum.
My Dearly Beloved and I had wandered down to the local multiplex, not really expecting to find anything worth watching, but sufficiently curious to make the effort. Amid the usual mountain of blockbuster crap, we saw the ad for Keeping Mum. Neither of us had heard of it, but since it featured Rowan Atkinson, we took a punt and decided to give it a go.
Keeping Mum starts with a short prologue that tells the story of a young woman who murders her husband and his mistress and packs their bodies into trunks. Flash forward forty years, and we’re in a rustic country village. The vicar (Atkinson) has been asked to deliver the key-note address at a conference, and spends the film obsessed with delivering the perfect speech. So involved is he in his own dilemma that he fails to notice his family is in trouble: his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) is falling under the spell of a sleazy American golf professional (played with great aplomb by Patrick Swayze), while his son is being bullied at school and his daughter generally running wild.
Into this situation arrives the new housekeeper (Dame Maggie Smith). She quickly sums up the situation and takes matters into her own hands. The school-yard bullies are routed, the wild child learns the joys of domesticity. But it is the marriage she especially sets about repairing, introducing vicar Atkinson to the erotic frission of the Song of Songs as a means of both re-igniting his sexual interest in wife Thomas (who, I have to say, does a Jamie Lee Curtis and shows how naturally beautiful older women can be), and as a way of combating the wiles of would-be marriage-wrecker Swayze.
The tension builds nicely through a series of revelations. The housekeeper is none other than the young woman from the prologue. Moreover, she’s also vicar's wife's mother, having been forced to give her daughter up for adoption when jailed for her crimes all those years ago. And to top it all off, she’s still killing: first an annoying neighbourhood dog, then the owner of said dog, and eventually - well, I won’t spoil it by telling you who else falls prey to her homocidal tendencies.
The highlight is Atkinson’s performance at the conference. He begins with the bumbling, comedic vicar we’ve come to know from films like Four Weddings and a Funeral. But he then moves into a powerful and moving speech on the mystery of God as expounded in the Book of Isaiah. My ways are not your ways. “In other words,” Atkinson tells us, “God is saying: I’m mysterious - live with it.”
The final twist at the end may disturb some, but I highly recommend you grab this film on DVD and set aside an afternoon, a packet of chocolate bikkies, and some plunger coffee for the kind of wonderful character-driven comedy-drama the English make so well.
Talk to you soon,
BB
Quote for the Day: Men don't like me for my mind; they like me for what I don't mind. (Mae West)
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