Movie Log: Keeping Mum

Keeping Mum is, I venture to say without double-checking, the only British black comedy to prominently feature Patrick Swayze. (And he's actually pretty good in it: the script calls for him to be a lecherous, overly-tanned American stereotype of a golf pro, and he nails that.)

The movie opens forty-three years ago, with Emilia Fox as a young woman on a train who is soon confronted by the authorities about the large quantities of blood seeping out of her trunk. It seems that she has killed and dismembered her husband and his lover, who were about to run away together. So she's packed off to a briefly-glimpsed home for the criminally insane.

Fast-forward to now. Rowan Atkinson is the distracted Rev. Walter Goodfellow; Kristin Scott Thomas is his (still quite attractive) wife Gloria, with whom he has not been intimate in far too long. They have two children: teenage sexpot Holly and bullied schoolboy Petey. And they also have a new housekeeper, Grace Hawkins (Maggie Smith), just about to join their family.

(No points on connecting those dots; the movie doesn't try to conceal it.)

Grace -- and, yes, her name is commented upon by our local vicar -- proceeds to help her new family in ways that bear some similarity to the way she helped herself all those years ago. She also encourages Walter to show more attention to his wife, gets Holly interested in cooking, and helps Petey out with some bullies (without actually dismembering them).

Keeping Mum is a fairly gentle black comedy -- it's a family black comedy, if that categorization makes any sense. The plot does have some holes in it; one, in particular, must be large enough to drive the golf pro's car through. And the ending falls flat -- it's intended to say something humorously cutting about family, but it's staged badly, and events could not have worked that way. But it's a movie that means well, and is easy to believe in most of the way. The actors playing the two children are decent, and the major players all nicely underplay what could have been very broad. If you go into it not expecting greatness, I expect you'll be adequately entertained.