“Coup!” To you too [MOVIE REVIEW]
The more things change, the more they remain the same, or at least they do in “Coup!” set during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
The city has been abandoned; businesses have closed; people are starving; the government of Woodrow Wilson is cracking down on dissenters and anyone spreading criticism of the efforts to curb the disease. But some things never change; the rich have fled to their castles by the sea.
Peter Sarsgaard. Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
The man, earrings dangling low, fur hat over one eye, fringed leather jacket across his shoulders and moccasin boots on his feet are mere distractions to the gun he has in his hand and the dead body in front of him. Picking up the ID of the dead man, he studies it for similarities in his appearance, makes some adjustments and pockets the identification of Floyd Monk. Paperwork indicates that Monk had been hired as a personal chef to a Mr. Jay Horton, now sequestering on Egg Island, a paradise untouched by the plague. It is where Monk soon alights.
Jay Horton, nattily attired, spends his afternoons at his typewriter, penning screeds against the government and their inability to contain the flu. His accounts are those of a man in the field; first person accounts, feet on the ground. But his ground is actually far from the city, on an idyllic lake surrounded by forests; his only contact with the hoi polloi is at the local market, and even then he has one of his faithful servants do his bidding. He’s quite pleased with himself because everyone is convinced that he is in the pestilential metropolis suffering with his fellow man. The government, most displeased, has sent goons to the newspaper headquarters, making his columns even more popular. A progressive who shouts his support for the common man as he drinks his top shelf Scotch obtained from his local bootlegger, his self-satisfaction is temporarily interrupted by the announcement that their long-awaited chef has arrived.
Insouciant is a euphemism for the direct, impolitic approach Monk takes with his new employers. The other staff, a driver, an imperious housekeeper and the nanny are very surprised by his approach, although it is only Mrs. McMurray, the housekeeper, who is appalled. Monk does not believe in boundaries and is hell bent on changing the dynamics of the household. The questions he asks don’t have easy answers. Foremost among them, why are the staff housed separately? Are they not more exposed to disease if they are exposed to the outside? When he gets the Hortons to bring the servants into the mansion, the first crack in the hierarchy appears.
Sarah Gadon. Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
The sneering chef with the strange Southern accent is a figure of intrigue to the two Horton children and their frustrated socialite mother. She is attracted because, unlike her husband, he is interested in what she has to say. Everyone but Mrs. McMurray and the master of the house is interested in what he has to say. And what he has to say is at odds with how the Hortons live their lives. The Hortons are vegetarians, the right and progressive thing to do. Monk finds this hilarious; a problem only the rich can create.
Bit by bit, Monk chips away at the hierarchy dispatching his only formidable enemy, Mrs. McCarthy, to the mainland. In the bat of an eye, he has soon invaded the library, the liquor cabinet and the swimming pool all under the despairing eye of Mr. Horton and the inadvertently approving glance of the Mrs. Before you know it, he’ll have them eating meat.
Billy Magnussen and Sarah Gadon. Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
This is a delightful little black comedy of elitism, privilege, the games people play to convince themselves that they aren’t better than others, and how easy it is to tear away that fabric of civility. Something sinister is afoot, but it’s not just Monk’s desire to upend the social order but Horton’s desire to propel himself to an ever higher stratum of society, one in which he gains the admiration of no less than Upton Sinclair. Fittingly, it is the off-putting Mr. Monk who is more the harbinger of reality than the insincere and pretentious master of the household. As the power dynamic shifts, more is revealed.
Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, co-writers/directors, have delivered a sly look at a society that mirrored our own during the pandemic. It is a society of haves and have nots where the Gilded Age collided with the Progressive Era of reform. Horton may have written as a Progressive but his trappings are all Gilded. Monk wants nothing to do with either but, if it’s all the same to you, he’d just as soon swim in the pool and down a good glass of scotch.
The cast is quite good. Billy Magnussen as Jay Horton, thin and transparent in character at the beginning, becomes convincingly desperate as time progresses. Sarah Gadon as Mrs. Horton is effectively inconsequential and easily manipulated. Seen only briefly, Kristine Nielsen as Mrs. McMurray is hilariously hardened, Monk’s only formidable enemy. But the burden to carry the film lies on the strong shoulders of Peter Sarsgaard as Monk. Seemingly the stereotype of a common grifter, his Monk blossoms as a sinister presence in a home ripe for the taking. Gradually, he overtakes the viewer, as he has already overtaken those around him, as a believable force, if not for change, at least for comeuppance. But I’ve left that for you to fully discover because there are still many turns and surprises to come in this story of class warfare and it will overtake you with its wry, black humor. Not as effectively sinister as Joseph Losey’s classic “The Servant” (1963)—starring Dirk Bogarde as one of the most effectively evil schemers of all times as he transforms his rich boy employer into a sniveling, drug addicted puppet—“Coup!” still raises some of that specter of manipulation and intrigue.
See it on VOD platforms beginning September 3.