‘Slanted’ & ‘Fackham Hall’ Serve Up Satire With A Twist | At The Movies With Kasey
After awards season closes and before the summer blockbusters begin comes a time for smaller-budget and genre films to shine. This week, I checked out two films that blend genres, mixing horror and comedy or satire with the marriage plot.
Now in theaters, Slanted focuses on a young Chinese girl, Joan Huang (Shirley Chen), who immigrates to a small American town with her parents, Sofia (Vivian Wu) and Roger (Fang Du). As a child, she dreams of being crowned prom queen, but once she hits high school, she is well aware that the title always goes to someone white and blonde. When the most popular girl in school, Olivia Hammond (Amelie Zilber), lands a role on a TV series and cannot campaign for prom queen, Joan decides she might actually have a chance to win, so her best friend, Brindha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), helps her chase her dream. But then, a mysterious doctor contacts her, offering her the opportunity to change her appearance, to become her blonde-haired, blue-eyed American dream.
Slanted feels like Mean Girls meets The Substance. The body horror that comes from Joan’s transition is surrounded by plenty of satire and tender moments between her and her parents, reflecting on what it means to be an American and how our faces can carry our history and that of our families. Although the plot is focused on race and beauty standards, in an era when so many people are turning to fillers and plastic surgery, the message about what our faces mean to the people who love us can travel further than the more explicit themes. When Brindha tells Joan that if she thought she was ugly in her Chinese skin, then she must be ugly to her too, the moment raises a big, often unspoken question about beauty standards and how far some go to adhere to them.
\Much of the satire in Slanted happens in the background, in the details that the audience has to look for in the sets, but it also provides several corny sequences centered on Joan’s beauty treatments. The humor could undermine the poignant social criticism of the film were it not for how grounded the performances are. As Joan’s parents, Vivian Wu and Fang Du feel like the most lifelike people in a fictionalized American town. When they are upset about Joan’s transformation, they bring such nuance to the performance that they deliver needed gravity to the plot. As Joan’s white persona, Jo Hunt, Mckenna Grace maintains a sweetness to her performance that keeps the audience on Joan’s side as her plan starts to go horribly awry.
At times, Slanted is too on-the-nose or a bit cliched, but the tenderness in the performances and how rooted the screenplay is in heartfelt lived experiences give the story more depth than the satirical elements and the face-melting horror could.
Slanted was written and directed by Amy Wang. It runs 104 minutes and is rated R.
On HBO Max, Fackham Hall also offers satirical humor, spoofing the upper-class world familiar to fans of Downton Abbey with a murder mystery thrown in for good measure. The film opens with Lord Davenport (Damian Lewis) and Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston) preparing to marry their eldest daughter, Poppy (Emma Laird), off to her cousin, Archibald (Tom Felton), so their estate, Fackham Hall, stays in the family. When Rose jilts Archibald, the male heir, the Davenports are frantic, but the situation turns even more desperate when Lord Davenport is found murdered. Meanwhile, their rebellious younger daughter, Rose (Thomasin McKenzie), hits it off with a new servant, Eric (Ben Radcliffe).
Fackham Hall is the stupidest movie I have seen in some time. I will admit that it is a genre that I do not usually enjoy much, but sometimes it is nice to watch something that has jokes and plots so simple that you do not have to think much for the laugh. Fackham Hall dumps the audience into a setting and plotline that is exceedingly familiar to fans of upstairs/downstairs British stories and infuses the characters with a bargain-bin quality of Monty Python humor. The result is cheap, but the commitment to the bit on the part of the cast eventually won me over.
Thomasin McKenzie’s performance as Rose kept me watching. Her casting in this role fits much better than the solution to the convoluted murder mystery does. She has the right vintage beauty for the part and performs well as the pistol of a younger daughter.
Fackham Hall is the right movie if you want something familiar that will make you laugh without asking anything of you. It is not a good movie by any means, but it delivers on its genre consistently, and for a satire, sometimes that is all the audience wants.
Fackham Hall was written by Steve and Adam Dawson with Tin Inman and directed by Jim O’Hanlon. It runs 97 minutes and is rated R.
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