Coup!
The movie begins with shots of a manual typewriter, and angry words being spelled out letter by letter. The time and place of this new movie, co-directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman (who also wrote the script), becomes evident. It’s America in 1918, as the Spanish Flu is on its way to our shores. We see some vintage (fictional) headlines one reads “Wear a mask or go to jail.” Oh boy. Is this period film trying to be a parable of Our Own Time? Not exactly but sort of though not really. While the milieu of “Coup!” speaks allegorically to the pandemic of our own century, it does so softly; the movie is ultimately more a tale of class warfare than public health. The writer of those angry words among them “Immigrants and outsiders, colored and voiceless, demand closures!” is newspaper columnist J.C. Horton (Billy Magnusson), who oversees a kingdom by the sea while writing breathless accounts of urban riots that he pretends to have been present at. His journalism doesn’t exactly pay for his lavish estate; we learn in passing that his father was a meat magnate and that J.C.’s muckraking exposed his poor practices.
But before we’re properly introduced to pompous, hypocritical J.C., or his less stuck up wife Julie (Sarah Gadon), we see Peter Sarsgaard trimming his mustache in front of a mirror, fiddling with another man’s passport photo while saying goodbye to a corpse, then taking on that corpse’s identity Floyd Monk, newly hired as chef at the Horton estate, which will eventually undergo a form of lockdown that allows him to usurp Horton’s authority over his other servants (Horton calls them “staff,” as if that means anything), his family and much else.
Sarsgaard affects an enjoyably plummy Southern accent as the cheerfully dissolute rebel who likes to tweak propriety at every opportunity. Displaying a missing index finger that he’s proud to say he lost on San Juan Hill (and can’t quite keep from sneering and rolling his eyes when Horton says, “We are against mechanized mass slaughter here”), he just can’t help seeing how far out onto thin ice he can skate, like stage whispering “Why don’t you kiss my ass, nancy boy” to J.C., then revising it to “Why don’t we get some sassafras for the boy” when asked WHAT he just said. He plays three card monte with Horton’s young daughters, lets Julie play poker with him and the staff. We eventually learn the source of Monk’s real indignation; once the character is compelled to let his anger out, the indignation is momentarily bracing.
This representative of the lower class can do nothing with their indignation. That’s an understatement. But this path is not a smooth one to tread on. Monk does not trust Mrs. McMurray (Kristine Nielsen), who is the bossy head of staff, so he makes her leave by using poisonous mushrooms that will only make her slightly ill. The problem with the film shows itself when Mrs. McMurray responds to being drugged. She starts sweating and saying “The power of Christ compels you” before vomiting pea soup all over J.C This useless exorcist reference isn’t even a third as smart as the filmmakers think it is and represents an annoying smugness that Sarsgaard’s charismatic performance helps a lot with but doesn’t forgive entirely.
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