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Written by Boyd van Hoeij
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Friday, 16 December 2005 |
 If a film gives you exactly that you expected to get out of it, does that make it a good, bad or merely formulaic film? The Niall Johnson-directed Keeping Mum is all three at once. The Brit flick is a farcical black comedy about a family in which every member has a secret or two and in which the newly arrived housekeeper has the ideal – if somewhat radical – method to rid everyone of their problems. With Rowan Atkinson, Dame Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott-Thomas in the main roles, Keeping Mum also has the highest British star wattage in a single film since the ongoing cameo parade in the Harry Potter-series. Maggie Smith (Ladies in Lavender) is Grace, the new housekeeper of reverend Goodfellow (Atkinson), who is every inch as decent as his name is boring, and his wife Gloria (Scott-Thomas) and their children. They live in a British country house in the British countryside, as faithfully modelled after countless other British comedies such as Calendar Girls and Saving Grace. The plot has all the makings of an Alan Bennett comedy (think Habeas Corpus) but with the difference that an American (Richard Russo) has worked on the script together with the writer-director, inserting an American character – a golf teacher of all things – into the mix. The fact that he is played by Patrick Swayze is certainly bad and will be held against the casting director when she will come knocking on heaven’s door; the scene in which Swayze can be seen in nothing but a thong slip should immediately qualify this film as a horror.
Apart from the golf teacher – who has an apparently sexless fling with the reverend’s bored housewife – the proceedings are strictly British. Smith, Atkinson and Scott-Thomas all feel and look at home here, probably because this is nothing they have not done before. The humour is of the gentle kind, soliciting chuckles rather than belly-laughs, but the expertly paced and impeccably acted proceedings do keep the audience’s attention throughout. There is nothing particularly inventive about Keeping Mum, but neither is it something with which one could go wrong for a night out at the cinema, as long as one knows what to expect.
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