Keeping Mum – 2005 | 103 mins | Comedy | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Keeping Mum is writer/director Niall Johnson’s third and most successful feature after two earlier low-key efforts. The film is set in a mildly exaggerated rural parish similar to The Vicar of Dibley and despite its Ealingesque overtones the black comedy is more mild grey in comparison with genre standards like Kind Hearts and Coronets. The whimsical humour is laboured and the creaky plot regrettably reveals much of the film’s surprise during an opening flashback. The first-rate cast features Rowan Atkinson reprising his bumbling vicar from Four Weddings, Kristin Scott Thomas clearly revelling in a wonderful character role, a sadly underwritten Patrick Swazye and finally the marvellous twinkly-eyed Maggie Smith stealing the majority of scenes.

In the sleepy English hamlet of Little Wallop lives the middle-class Goodfellow family; the absent-minded Reverend Walter Goodfellow (Rowan Atkinson), his dissatisfied wife Gloria (Kristin Scott Thomas), and their two children, nymphomaniac daughter Holly and bullied son Petey. Gloria is a woman struggling to cope. Her teenage daughter has a constant string of lovers, her young son’s the perennial target for the school bullies and her marriage to Walter has long-since dwindled into monotony. It’s no wonder she’s struggling to resist the advances of her handsome, American, Lothario of a golf instructor, Lance (Patrick Swayze).

Salvation arrives in the form of new housekeeper “Grace Hawkins” (Maggie Smth), a genteel motherly woman with a smile for everyone and an answer for everything. One by one, the family members find that Grace is able to solve their problems, but they don’t realize that her means are leading to a lot of ends and the population of their rural parish is rapidly diminishing.