The Bishop's Wife
by Catherine Lee

      In The Bishop’s Wife, David Niven plays a bishop who has lost his way in faith in a haze of ambition for a bigger and better cathedral. He ignores his family and is brought back to faith and life by an angel. In Keeping Mum Rowan Atkinson plays a vicar who has lost his way in faith in a haze of endless, numbing details that the parishoners of Little Wallop relentlessly heap on him. He ignores his family and is brought back to faith and life by a very human, very fallen angel.   

      Keeping Mum is a black comedy, very British, in the tradition of The Ladykillers or, from this country, Arsenic and Old Lace. It is wonderfully funny and frothy, but it does contain, surprisingly, quite a bit of faith – but not the puritanical scolding nonsense or the feel-good mega-church advertising that characterize too much of  evangelical “Christianity” in this country. No, this faith is very British. It is internal, not external, and its practitioners are ridden with sin, flaws and foibles.

      Throughout Keeping Mum, the vicar, Walter Goodfellow, is working on a very important sermon titled, “God’s Mysterious Ways.” One of the loveliest moments in the film is when the vicar is delivering this sermon and is speaking of God’s grace. He realizes, and it plays across his face like a small bolt of lightning, that his life has been transformed by God’s grace personified by his new housekeeper, Grace Hawkins. 

      When we first meet Grace, it is over 40 years ago. She is Rosie Jones (the charming Emilia Fox) and is young, lovely, cheerful and traveling on a train. The problem is that her very large trunk is leaking blood all over the baggage car. Rosie is sent to prison for killing and carving up her husband and his mistress. 

      When we meet Grace, she is arriving at the home of the Goodfellow family as their new housekeeper. Today’s Grace is played by Maggie Smith, and she is irresistible in the role. Decked out in tasteful but conservative hairdo and tweeds, she looks very different than when last seen as the elegant and snobby Lady Trentham in Gosford Park. Grace is a much more down-to-earth English lady, for whom “Shall I put the kettle on?” is the most repeated phrase. 

      I need no prompting to see a movie when Dame Maggie Smith is in the cast. In Keeping Mum she is in top form, with her spectacular voice giving precise and delicious inflection to every line and her fantastically expressive face full of subtle shadings of dismay, surprise and affection at every turn. This lady misses nothing that is going on in this troubled household. 

      And, oh my, there are troubles! The vicar’s wife Gloria is horribly frustrated. Her husband pays no attention to her or the kids and endless attention to nagging parishoners. He needs three reminders, and he still forgets to pick up their son at school. That son, Petey, “God Boy” as he is known by the local bullies, is regularly beat up at school. Daughter Holly is more than a knockout and – well, let’s face it – promiscuous. And to make all this worse, Gloria is continually sleep-deprived. Her deaf neighbor can’t hear his dog barking all night, but Gloria and Walter can’t hear anything else.  

      The children, played by Toby Parkes and Tamsin Egerton, are quite good. Egerton is especially good. She is not just beautiful; she is funny and captures the weird sensibilities of teenage confusion perfectly. Watch for her in future films. 

      Mom Gloria is played by the wonderful Kristen Scott Thomas. Scott Thomas shared screen time with Maggie Smith in Gosford Park and, as in that film, is often seen in roles where she is an elegant woman from an earlier time. It is great to see her play a contemporary role, where she’s trying her best but not quite succeeding. She swears, worries and asks God for help. She’s contemplating an affair with her golf instructor — that’s how low her spirits are. 

      Patrick Swayze is Lance, the golf instructor, and he’s the perfect gross American. Dishonest, deceitful, vulgar, lecherous, over-tanned, over-whitened teeth, with a completely exaggerated sense of his own attractiveness, he’s really a horror. The idea that Gloria would consider running away with this dude is a weakness in the picture, but with Grace in the picture we know that Lance’s days are numbered. 

      Things begin to take a turn for the good for the Goodfellows as soon as Grace arrives. That annoying dog next door? He disappears shortly after Grace arrives. With a good night’s sleep possible, both Gloria and Walter start to think a bit more clearly. 

      Gloria tells Grace the sweet details of how she fell for Walter but ends with, “When they eventually find God, why do they lose their sense of humor?” Cut to Grace gently leading Walter to humor and web sites with Jesus jokes. 

      Petey’s tormentors find their bicycles are having brake failures. Holly’s interest in boys doesn’t diminish, but she does start hanging around the house more and taking sensual pleasure in cooking as well as boys.  

      After introducing Walter to laughs, Grace reminds Walter about sex. Rowan Atkinson is known too well as Mr. Bean or as the tongue-tied minister in Four Weddings and a Funeral. He is very funny and fumbling in Keeping Mum, but he’s also very good at playing a man who wants to do right and good by his family and his parish. When Grace forces Walter to reconsider the Song of Solomon, we are treated to a sequence where the vicar remembers his wife as we hear him read the Song of Solomon in voice-over. And this is not some hokey, dumbed-down translation of the Biblical text. It is the first and best English translation of the Bible, the translation that captures the poetry of the text, from its original languages into our own King James version. 

      Keeping Mum is the kind of movie they don’t make anymore, except of course, sometimes, they do. It is full of contradictions and a mix of tones. Murder makes you laugh, gasp and feel a tad guilty in Keeping Mum. Sinners we are, and sinners we will be. Keeping Mum reminds us that we cannot escape what makes us human, and we might as well keep our sense of humor about it.  As Walter tells us, “God is mysterious. Live with it.”

Catherine Lee is the executive director of Fort Wayne Cinema Center, the only independently operated movie theater in Fort Wayne, specializing in independent, foreign, documentary, specialty and classic films.

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