Film reviews: Savage House | Madfabulous
Period drama Savage House flirts with revolutionary politics and the manic energy of encroaching madness, but ultimately turns into a fairly obvious satire, writes Alistair Harkness
A putrid period romp that tries a little too hard to channel the filth and fury of The Favourite and the irony of Barry Lyndon, the new black comedy Savage House at least provides Richard E Grant with an excuse to unleash his inner Withnail. He plays Sir Chauncey Savage, a low-born rake on the make in 1740s England who’s married into money and now lives a debt-ridden existence amid the landed gentry whose approval he craves and rejects with equal self-loathing.
Though his wife, Lady Savage (Claire Foy), loves him for who he is, they’re both obsessed with improving their social standing – so when the opportunity to host the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire arises following a social calendar-disrupting outbreak of the pox, they go out of their way to transform their gauche, barely functioning household into a covetous locale for the very aristocracy they despise.
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Written and directed by Peter Glanz (who scripted last year’s Marvel non-starter Captain America: Brave New World), the film certainly has a good time revelling in its characters’ debauchery and derangement, with Grant and Foy respectively all in as the aristocracy-swindling, gout-ridden lord of the manor and his sharp-witted, footman-shagging wife. But while it’s fun watching Grant ham it up and Foy cut loose, all the gross-out scenes of lechery, leeches, fornication and faecal matter start to feel like a desperate-to-outrage distraction from a story that flirts with Machiavellian treachery, class revenge, revolutionary politics and the manic energy of encroaching madness, but ultimately delivers a fairly obvious barbarians-at-the-gate satire, one that builds to a frustratingly mundane non-ending.
Still, better Savage House’s ribald rabble-rousing than the tepid showboating of Madfabulous, yet another wannabe outrageous costume drama, albeit one that this time commits the cardinal sin of being thoroughly boring. It’s a biopic of Henry Cyril Paget (Callum Scott Howells), a flamboyant aristocratic outlier who inherited his position as the fifth Marquess of Anglesey in the 1890s, married his cousin (Ruby Stokes) and promptly scandalised and almost bankrupted his family and, indeed, the whole of Anglesey, with his penchant for gender-nonconforming outfits and profligate spending in support of his iconoclastic lifestyle.
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Though the end credits inform us he burned through the equivalent of more than £200 million in today’s money in the few short years before his death from consumption, aged 29, the film tries to frame his antics as both an outré, crowd-pleasing romp and a kind of touchy-feely story of self-acceptance in the face of the rigid British class system. It’s a needle Celyn Jones’ bland direction and Lisa Baker’s shallow script comes nowhere close to threading, though Rupert Everett does some good work as the Paget’s ageing butler sympathetic to his master’s predicament.
Both films in cinemas from 5 June
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