In America, declares one minor chorus character in Coup!, “you either have servants or you are one”. A slow-born domestic thriller with an undertow of caustic social commentary, this handsome period piece from New York writer-director duo Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman was party inspired by the glaring inequalities exposed by the recent Coronavirus pandemic, but the end result feels more timelessly traditional than current, invoking vintage class-war dramas like The Servant (1963) more than recent eat-the-rich polemics like Parasite (2019).
Coup! is an engaging battle of wits powered by strong performances across the board, notably from Peter Saarsgard as a devilishly charming proto-hippie revolutionary with murky, possibly murderous intentions. Following its world premiere on the Lido as the closing film in the Venice Days section, this old-school crowd pleaser should pick up further festival momentum, while its evergreen political themes and familiar country-house thriller tropes may help open doors commercially.
Set in 1918, Coup! draws on real historical events, with true-life public figures occasionality intruding on the action, though the main players are fictional. Immediately after World War I, the notorious “Spanish flu” pandemic is sweeping the world, killing more Americans than died in the trenches of Europe. With businesses shut down, legal mandates to wear masks, and violent riots erupting against lockdown restrictions, the parallels with COVID-19 are glaringly obvious but not overstretched.
A smooth-talking sociopath with a shady agenda, Floyd Monk (Sarsgaard) flees the piled-up body bags and eerily deserted streets of Manhattan for an idyllic wooded island off the East Coast. Here he passes himself off as the newly hired cook at the palatial country estate of Jay Horton (Billy Magnussen), an Ivy League man of wealth and privilege who enjoys a high-profile career as a campaigning left-wing journalist, decrying President Woodrow Wilson’s callous mistreatment of immigrants and workers from his high moral perch.
Even though he is safely isolating from the virus in his mansion with his wife Julie (Sarah Gadon) and their two cherubic children, Horton’s newspaper columns strongly imply that he is on the urban front-line, heroically fighting alongside the poor and dispossessed. His solidarity with society’s downtrodden masses may well be sincere, but it also chimes conveniently with his career ambitions, as he plans to run for state governor under the newly formed, short-lived Progressive Party founded by Theodore Roosevelt. In this regard he is relying on support from famous real-world novelist and socialist campaigner Upton Sinclair (Fisher Stevens), who offers his qualified endorsement in a series of probing phone calls.
The wily Monk spots Horton’s hypocrisy instantly, smartly exploiting this weakness for his own political leverage, undermining his new employer’s authority in front of his wife and children, skewering his pomposity, exposing his hollow rhetoric. Meanwhile this impish interloper also begins sewing seeds of mutiny among huis fellow household staff, all poor immigrants and minorities, galvanising them to fight for better pay and conditions. As the pandemic reaches the island, with food running scarce and staff falling sick, the power struggle between Monk and Horton escalates into deadly open warfare. There will be blood.
With its single-set backdrop and talk-heavy chamber-drama format, Coup! often feels like an old-fashioned stage farce. Handsomely shot in unshowy classical camerawork and painterly autumnal vistas of the leafy New Jersey location, it is solidly crafted and well acted. That said, Stark and Schuman play a very conventional hand, steering audience loyalty in a manner that feels bluntly schematic at times. While Monk’s mutinous motives becomes more tricksy as the story unfolds, Horton is so plainly an unsympathetic, self-promoting clown that his humbling is a little too easy for viewers to savour. More psychological and narrative nuance might have given this fun but minor chamber piece more compelling complexity, suspenseful tension and political bite. An ironically jaunty score, by Nathan Halpern and Chris Ryan, hints at a Coen brothers-like level of knowing, genre-subverting mischief that Coup! never quite delivers.
Directors, screenwriters: Austin Stark, Joseph Schuman
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Magnussen, Sarah Gadon, Skye P. Marshall, Faran Kaan, Kristine Nielsen, Callum Vinson, Fisher Stevens
Producers: Brian Levy, Harris Gurny, Warner Davis, Molly Conners, Amanda Bowers, Jane Sinisi
Cinematography: Conor Murphy
Editing: Harrison Atkins, Alan Canant
Music: Nathan Halpern, Chris Ryan
Production company: Phiphen Pictures (US)
World sales: Film Constellation
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Venice Days)
In English
98 minutes
