‘The Secret Agent’

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (R)

★★★★

“This is one of the year’s best films, and one of the most distinctive,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. An award winner at Cannes, the sixth feature from Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho is “a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and a re-creation of a time and place,” yet that’s not all. Wagner Moura stars as a young widower on the run who returns to his home city to check on his young son in 1977, during Brazil’s brutal dictatorship. “Murder is everywhere,” a constant threat. But Mendonça is less focused on the violence than how people learn to adapt to it, and “if you’re willing to bend with the story, The Secret Agent will take you places movies rarely go.” Moura, whose
character goes by the alias Marcelo, “carries the film with a star turn of suave determination,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker.

You’d think it would be easy to parody beloved period British dramas because they have so many guilty pleasure repeated tropes: huge historic houses, romances within and between upper classes and their servants, swooningly fabulous clothes, luscious meals, fabulous furnishings, and dialogue that sounds witty even when it isn’t because it is delivered in heavenly aristocratic accents with exquisite, RADA-trained diction. But the secret to the really great parody is truly loving whatever it is you’re making fun of. Thus, on a scale from the top (by Grabthar’s hammer, that would be “Galaxy Quest”) to the sloppy (I love you, Wayanses, but noticing something is not the same as being funny about it), “Fackham Hall” comes in around the middle.

Its watchability comes from the very elements it is trying to undermine: the fairy-tale setting of a huge country house, antique furniture, and beautiful people wearing gorgeous period clothes, speaking in accents ranging from elegant upper-class to cute commoner. Most of its jokes are based less on observing what makes these works so popular than on what is silliest or most outrageous. But what’s funny in the writers’ room does not always work on screen. An example of the tone is the title, the name of the characters’ residence, which a character says aloud to make sure we know it sounds like a crude insult to everyone involved.

The story is set in 1931, or, to put it in context, after the end of “Downton Abbey” and around the third of the ensuing films. We are informed, in case you have no exposure of any kind to this genre, in which case, why are you even watching this, that “England was a nation divided by class.” The country is suffering through a depression, but the Davenport family, who have occupied their ancestral home for 400 years, have no such concerns. (The 2,500-acre estate of Knowsley Hall, also featured in “Peaky Blinders,” plays the part of the ancestral home.) 

“The sheer grandeur of Fackham Hall was a testament to splendor and an enduring family legacy,” we are told by a narrator whose identity we will not discover until the end. “They led a decadent life and barely had to lift a finger.” Indeed, Lord Davenport (Damian Lewis) is sipping a cocktail from a glass held to his lips by a servant. He and Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston) are congratulating themselves on the upcoming wedding of their daughter, Poppy (Emma Laird), to the presumptive heir to the property, Archibald (Tom Felton). “I’m just delighted she’s finally found the right cousin,” Lord Davenport smiles. As anyone who knows this genre understands, only males can inherit the land. Since the Davenports’ four sons, John, Paul, George, and Ringo, all died, this marriage is the only way they will be able to stay in their home. Thus, the motto on the family crest is “Incestuous ad Infinitum.”

The Davenports’ other daughter, considered too old and independent-minded at 23 to be likely to find a husband, is Rose (Thomasin McKenzie). She will soon meet a plucky orphan lad and kind-hearted pickpocket named Eric Noone (as in “no one”), played by Ben Radcliffe, handsome and charming enough to play the lead in any period romantic drama, and wisely calibrates his performance as though he is doing just that.

Noone is sent to deliver a message to Fackham Hall just as Poppy and Archibald are about to get married, except they don’t, because Poppy makes a dramatic race from the church to the arms of her low-born beloved. This puts the pressure on Rose to take over as Archibald’s fiancée and save the family home.

This is one of those “throw everything at the screen and by the time you realize that one wasn’t funny, four more will have come at you” movies. These include running jokes, anachronisms, sight gags, potty humor (in one case, chamber pot-y humor), slapstick, an extended dick joke, an extended “who’s on first”-type joke involving a character named Watt, sight gags, and verbal misunderstandings, e.g., “You fought [in WWI] with my father.” “No, we were on the same side.” And a tailor shop called “Tailor Swift.”

One element of this film that works well is that the actors understand the assignment, no winking at the audience, except for British comedian/presenter and co-writer of the screenplay, Jimmy Carr, playing a vicar who cannot help running the liturgy texts together to make them sound dirty. The score by Oli Julian and the costumes by Rosalind Ebbutt are also perfectly suitable for the kinds of movies this one spoofs. It’s just the jokes that, like British cocktails, are to American taste lukewarm.

They say write what you know, which is probably why there are so many damn films about Hollywood. The latest navel-gazer, Jay Kelly, is about an aging movie star (played, not coincidentally, by aging movie star George Clooney) reflecting on his life and his choices. The film is directed with care and style and generous (if occasionally gimmicky) wit by Noah Baumbach and the performances by both Clooney and Adam Sandler as Ron Sukenick, Jay’s long-suffering manager, are excellent. But a little part of me was like, remind me again why I’m supposed cares about this vain multimillionaire and his extremely niche problems?

Having just wrapped his latest film, the 60-year-old Jay is having an existential crisis, of sorts. It has dawned on him that he spent so much time building his career, his life is empty. He’s neglected the two most important relationships of his life, namely with his daughters. He doesn’t really know who he is beyond the glamorous façade and he has no real friends, other than Ron, who is on the payroll.

If you’re thinking this all sounds a bit familiar that’s because a very similar film came out of Norway earlier this season, Sentimental Value. I’m not going to make broad generalizations about American vs. European films—especially since Baumbach is the spiritual successor to Woody Allen who was deeply influenced by the European greats—but suffice it to say that the Norwegian one, which focused mainly on the inner lives of the abandoned daughters, was better.

The crux of Jay Kelly is that our titular hero is always surrounded by a coterie that includes his manager, a stylist (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script), a bodyguard-cum-butler, a publicist (Laura Dern), and various other hangers on, but he’s supremely lonely. (An on-going joke has Jay complaining he’s always alone just as his bodyguard hands him a cold drink.)

And Ron is beginning to reassess his devotion to Jay. He’s given the better part of his life to this man—willing to drop any other commitment, including to his own children, on a dime to attend to him—but was it all worth it? Are they even friends?

“Friends don’t take 15 percent,” Jay snaps to Ron during one particularly bruising fight.

But at least Ron still has his family—although his wife (Baumbach’s real-life partner Greta Gerwig in what amounts to an extended cameo) blames him for their daughter’s almost debilitating anxiety. Jay, however, is essentially on his own. His oldest daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), has all but given up on him. “You know how I know you didn’t want to spend time with me?” she asks him bitterly. “Because you didn’t spend time with me.”

Oof.

And he now he finds himself desperate to connect with his younger daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), who is about to embark on a European vacation with her friends before heading off for college.

Daisy has more fondness, or at least more patience, with her dad—she finds him amusing—but she isn’t going to suddenly disrupt her life to spend time with him. She heads off on her own.

Jay Kelly occasionally employs an A Christmas Carol-style structure where Jay revisits pivotal scenes of his life. One comes after he finds out that the director who gave him his first big break, Peter Scheider (Jim Broadbent), has died. Jay is indebted to Schneider, or should be, at least—and they’ve remained friends. But one of those flashbacks has Schneider begging Jay to do his latest film, as he needs the money. With a kind of cold efficiency masking as kindness, Jay refuses him. We see this a lot with Jay. He is good at indicating friendship and generosity of spirit, but there’s no substance behind his cheer.

At Schneider’s funeral, Jay reconnects with his old acting school roommate, Timothy (Billy Crudup). Turns out, despite his eagerness to grab a beer, Timothy despises Jay—blames him for stealing his life. It is, in fact, not an exaggeration. In another flashback we see cocky young Jay (now played by Charlie Rowe, not quite convincingly) snatch an audition for Schneider’s film right out from under Timothy (Louis Partridge), even using Timothy’s own improvements to the script that Timothy was too shy to incorporate. (The suggestion here is twofold: Yes, Jay stole from Timothy. But also, Jay had the kind of ballsiness to make those embellishments to the script. When he tells Timothy he didn’t have what it took, was he possibly…right?)

Finding out that his old friend, about whom he has warmly nostalgic feelings, actually hates his guts is another turning point for Jay. He’s more determined than ever to repair his relationship with Daisy—perhaps his last hope for redemption—so decides to track her down in Europe, using a lifetime achievement award he’ll be receiving from the Tuscan Film Festival as his excuse.

In one of the film’s most irritating scenes, he is forced to take a train from Paris to Rome with the actual little people, who are depicted as kindly, salt-of-the-earth types; a train full of Mrs. Clauses and Geppettos. Jay watches them, moist-eyed, thinking this is what he has missed in life. It’s beyond patronizing, although Baumbach adds a small dose of reality when someone points out to Jay that the people are on their best behavior because they’re in front of a movie star. Later in the train ride, Jay pulls a Tom Cruise and catches a purse snatcher—it’s a clear inside joke as Clooney even does Cruise’s intense, arm pumping run to catch up to him. Jay is hailed as a hero, but even that is complicated. The man who stole the purse isn’t a hardened criminal but a family man off his meds. (Again, it felt like Baumbach was fighting against his own impulses in that scene.)

Recently, after watching Jerry Maguire for the first time in years, I complained that they didn’t make middlebrow films like that anymore—that is, smart and satisfying, if somewhat facile, films for grownups. This is definitely that. And there’s excellent here work from Clooney, who gives arguably his best performance ever in this a meta dissection of his own career and of the strange paradox of having a life that belongs to everyone but yourself.

[WARNING: HERE COMES A SPOILER OF SORTS BECAUSE I WANT TO DISCUSS THE FINAL SCENE]

Jay Kelly is ultimately a film about a man living with the consequences of his own narcissism but the final scene, at the Tuscan film festival, does hedge its bets a bit: We see a montage of Jay/Clooney’s films and it brings tears to his eyes. He was great. He did move people. It was a wonderful life, in its own way. He’s so touched by what he sees on screen that he reaches out for the hand of a loved one—but there’s only Ron, so he clutches his hand instead. It’s both sad and kind of beautiful. The film has sneakily been a love story between these two hollow men the whole time.