It seems we’re experiencing a spate of movies about family — Yours, Mine and Ours and Cheaper by the Dozen II as anodyne pap goes, the upcoming Prime and The Squid and the Whale for more thoughtful fare. This week we have Winter Passing and Keeping Mum to consider. The former is American and the latter British, with all the dissimilarities that implies, though Keeping Mum is an Americanised kind of British comedy. Both deal with family matters, but come at them from notably different angles.
Winter Passing is very much an “indie” movie — or at least what passes for one now that “indie” has hardened into a recognisable style rather than simply indicating a film made outside the mainstream Hollywood system. It has the indie hallmarks of a slightly rambling pace, a young star playing a somewhat discombobulated character, and an older, more established star (Ed Harris) putting in some low-paid cred-work. It even has a big comedy figure (Will Ferrell) doing his first real bit of serious acting.
Zooey Deschanel is Reese Holdin, a struggling actress with drug issues and the daughter of two famous writers (a situation startlingly similar to that of The Squid and the Whale). Her mom has recently died, and dad hasn’t published anything new in years. She is offered lots of money to find the letters her parents wrote to each other in the early days of their romance; the publication of such letters would be a major literary coup. At first Reese resists, but then she takes the money and heads back home to Middle America to see her estranged father and get the letters.
Despite all the indie signifiers, this is fairly regulation-issue American family drama. There are revelations and redemptions, though Winter Passing plays such plot points in a commendably understated way.
Harris does a variation on his roles in The Hours and Pollock, or something in between. As always, he is a dependable dramatic presence, even if the role itself is rather clichéd. Here we have the reclusive, blocked writer very much in the mould of the character played by Michael Douglas in The Wonder Boys or Sean Connery in Finding Forrester. (American writers, it seems, are by definition tormented, and preferably reclusive — as if they were all JD Salinger.) Just to make sure we don’t confuse Harris’s heavy-drinking, tormented writer with his heavy-drinking, tormented Jackson Pollock, instead of being bald Harris has been given a full head of straggly greying hair and a beard to match.
Ferrell does well in his first major dramatic role, adding some gentle humour to his portrayal of the burnt-out writer’s helper and hanger-on.
Deschanel as Reese holds it all together as the central consciousness of the piece; it is her feelings and reactions that are most important. If she is frequently irritating in her youthful self-obsession, that is the nature of the character, and Deschanel should get some credit for making Reese reasonably tolerable nonetheless. There are only two or three moments in the movie where the urge to slap her becomes unbearable.
While the tone of Winter Passing is rather earnest, making sure we know there are some deep Dr Phil issues at hand, Keeping Mum by contrast has a determinedly comic attitude. Even death is treated facetiously.
Rowan Atkinson plays the vicar of a small village in the English countryside. It’s temping to say that he is taking on his first major dramatic role. But we always knew Atkinson was more than just a comedian of genius and, even though he’s mostly playing it for laughs in Keeping Mum, he is also creating as credible a character as the movie will allow — and credible he is. Unless we’ve just got so used to the idea of the denizens of the English countryside as charming, bumbling eccentrics that we accept such a scenario. Vicars, at any rate, are natural figures of fun.
Kristin Scott Thomas plays his wife, and she’s having a very hard time. Her husband is inattentive, her son is being bullied at school, her daughter has a new boyfriend every week and the yapping of a horrid little dog keeps her awake night after night. Her nerves are shredded, so it’s a great relief to her when the family’s new housekeeper and nanny, Grace (Maggie Smith), turns out to be such a godsend — and a whole lot of things start to go mysteriously right.
It’s a treat to see Scott Thomas doing comedy; it almost erases one’s memories of her seriously sad role in The English Patient and her cold hauteur in Gosford Park. She’s working the other way round to Atkinson: instead of trying to infuse a comic persona with some dramatic credibility, she is taking a dramatic approach and letting the comedy filter through. Even her melancholy beauty perfectly fits her persona here, and the interaction between her and Atkinson is delightful. They keep the comedy and the drama so well balanced that they can produce an amusing but also moving love scene.
Otherwise, however, Keeping Mum as a whole can’t stay on that tightrope without wobbling. It is a genuinely funny movie, and for that we must be thankful, but how funny is murder? In the prologue, a ghastly killing is treated very lightly, and the movie continues to deal with murder as a joke. That wouldn’t jar in a piece of whimsy such as Kind Hearts and Coronets or Theatre of Blood, but here it undermines the film’s real human ballast. If we’re meant to have feelings for these people, as if they were real — and the film succeeds in that — then we should also find their evil deeds repellant. But the film sidesteps moral judgement and simply asks us to laugh. So these well-developed characters seem to thin out into panto-mime figures, to which no real blame or guilt attaches.
Smith, for one, seems to have been displaced into Keeping Mum from a stylised 1950s comedy and, despite the fun she provides, always seems a little out of context.
That tonal (or moral) problem aside, Keeping Mum is enjoyable in a way few of today’s alleged comedies manage to be, and Atkinson and Scott Thomas engage our sympathies more readily than do the most earnest moments of Winter Passing.