A Private Function

Bitter anti-Thatcher satire disguised as a comedy; with two great performances by Maggie Smith & Denholm Elliott.

From the Handmade Films website. Fair use.

A Private Function (1984). Grade: C+

Good Grief, another Awful Rich People movie. I’m getting cursed to watch these things. Maybe this is another preview of my future Purgatory — to have to spend time listening to the petty grievances of shallow, foolish wealth.

There was a reason I never saw the movie Titanic, and it’s not because I find James Cameron largely dull — although I do — and it’s not because the trailer showed images of people dying spectacularly in ways that made the audience go “cool” — although I thought those were tasteless. It’s because the trailer also showed scenes of that old, boring cliche; how rich people are elegant, fascinating, and malicious.

I went to high school with rich people; I’ve been in the homes of rich people, and worked at a country club serving them. Some are indeed malicious, most think they are elegant, and they’re almost uniformly boring.

At least Alan Bennett gets that part right. He’s an English actor/writer (going on 90!) who’s worked primarily in theater since the 1960s. Several of his plays have been turned into acclaimed films, like The Lady in the Van with Maggie Smith, and The Madness of King George with Nigel Hawthorne. (In that one, we know the king is getting better when he goes back to being his old, petty, annoying self.)

A Private Function is written directly for the screen. While it’s set in the period immediately following WWII, my guess is it’s really not about that at all. It’s about the triumph of Thatcherism, the idea that “there is no such thing as society.” That everyone is, or should be, fiercely competing for everything with everyone else, and any dollar spent on public services is a wasteful form of theft.

It’s an old notion, sometimes given intellectual or philosophical dressing, often reveled in for its own, sadistic sake. Ultimately, those who do best under such a concept are the lousiest people in the world.

That pretty much describes most of the characters in A Private Function — they’re amoral schemers, social climbers, and outright jerks, whose primary goal in life is winning envy and dispensing contempt. They’re not shown as fascinatingly elegant; they’re just small-minded, mean, rotten people.

Oh, and they all win. Spoiler alert! The nasty people you can’t stand all win. It’s a Boxtrolls where Archibald Snatcher wins, a Michael Clayton where Tilda Swinton wins. There’s a cute pig that two characters grow attached to and want to save from butchering. They don’t! Pig dies!

I only mention this because I think the movie works best if you know what’s going to happen. It’s shaped like a comedy, and you are expecting the awful people’s plan to backfire, somehow, right until the credits come up. Nope, they win, they’re all very pleased with themselves.

The plot is, England still has extreme food rationing right after the war. Which, for the average working person, is a real hardship. Nobody’s starving, but they’re all hungry. While the rich, and those who kowtow to them, are able to get around rationing. They just use bribery.

A smallish town’s biggest bigshot — a nasty local doctor — wants to throw a big party celebrating whatever royalty were getting married at the time. Mostly, he wants to do it because it gives him the chance to decide who’s on the guest list; he loves crossing off names of the unworthy.

But such a fancy party would be impossible under strict rationing rules. And the local food inspector is a real stickler about those rules. (He lost all sense of taste after a childhood bout of measles, and doesn’t enjoy ANY food.) They can bribe some other police officials, but not that guy.

So they conspire to raise a pig in secret, which will be slaughtered for the shindig.

Definitely NOT on the invited list is chiropodist Michael Palin. Whose modest enterprise is starting to pick up more customers, but he’s still seen as riff-raff. (An irony here is that the bigshots in town, the doctor & an accountant, would be seen as riff-raff by the real English upper-class.) The awful town doctor wants to run Palin out of business, since he’s stealing away a few patients who might have gone to him instead for an ingrown toenail or such.

And Palin’s wife, Maggie Smith, is absolutely digusted by his lack of social achievement. If he’d picked a better profession, they’d be in with the in crowd by now. And they’d be able to eat so much better!

Palin eventually learns about the secret pig plan, and one time when he’s had enough of Smith berating him, he suggests they should just steal it. Which she’s all in for.

While I’ve already spoiled most of the plot points, I won’t spoil what happens with Smith’s character after this juncture. Let’s just say she finds some greedy opportunities, and she makes use of them.

It’s a yummy performance by Smith. You can compare it to the one she won awards for in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but it’s a less crudely-concieved character. That pompus schooteacher existed to be taken down a notch by the writer. Here, Bennett is also mocking Smith’s social ambitions, but she’s no worse than anyone else in the movie because of it. And in fact a little cleverer about playing dirty than they are.

Also great is Denholm Elliott as the mean doctor. He starts out a snob, and just gets worse and worse. And he has the funniest lines in the movie when he shows what a totally conceited ass he is. He’s upset at the thought of a National Health Service forcing him to treat those disgusting poors — “sometimes I wonder what the last war was for?”

You’ll recongnize other faces in the cast, too, like Pete Postlethwaite¹ and Richard Griffiths. Rachel Davies is a jucily voracious local widow, and Liz Smith won a BAFTA for her funny part as Maggie Smith’s addled mother. (They were not actually related.)

Overall, I found the nastiness overwhelmed the satire a bit too much. For example, the way Elliott’s doctor venerates the royal couple — “of a purity and a nobility scum like you just can't comprehend” — but enjoys feeling up women at the party dance. And the food inspector’s a furtive perv, and so’s the most corrupt butcher in town, and Smith keeps calling Palin a pansy. Clearly, we’re meant to see that these are all grimy sexual opportunists who’re turned on by domination (of others, or of themselves).

And I’ve little doubt that Bennett’s own sexual politics are are a reason for this acerbity. He’d had affairs with men (and so had Elliott), and the Thatcher government was known for ignoring police abuses of the gay community (it’s one of the background subjects in the great 2014 movie Pride). Conservatives of the era, like their ilk in most eras, screamed bloody murder about how gay people were ruining the nuclear family (right, that’s how that works). Bennett’s right to point out that many such scolds are total hypocrites when it comes to their private lives.

But just because he’s right, doesn’t make any of these people any more pleasant to be around. Only Palin doesn’t seem to be consumed with malice, and his doddering mother-in-law (who probably would be if she still had the wits for it). And even then, Palin just basically exists for everyone else to crap all over. Literally, in the case of the pig.

(Producer Mark Shivas said that the three pigs used in shooting were especially hard to handle, and freaked out almost everyone on set, especially Smith. Maybe she smelled yummy?)

These are good performances, especially by Smith and Elliott; they’re just in an angry, unpleasant movie. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is angry at Thatcher, too, and it’s much more unpleasant — I worked at a theater showing it and we had to clean up vomit after every screening — but, in that one, at least the bad guys don’t win! Here, they all do.

So, one of the more realistic movies around, in that sense!

If you want to see Smith in another Bennett role criticizing English manners/hypocrisies, but not one where any pig gets killed, you might check out this filmed monologue, Bed Among the Lentils:

It’s from a 1988 TV series Bennett wrote called Talking Heads, where every episode features one standout actor giving a 30-60 minute speech about their characters’ lives. In this one, Smith is a vicar’s wife, resigned to the fact that her husband really is a vain, boring man, and finding at least some happiness in one small shop the next town over. It’s a lovely quiet performance.

I learned about this from reading a very interesting book review on RogerEbert.com by Dan Callahan, about a 2015 Smith biography. She was a very private person, but what friends/family do reveal is that Smith’s mother was just horrible; telling her she was too ugly to be an actress. No wonder she excelled at playing messed-up mean people… she knew one pretty well.

1. By the way, I deserve a cookie for spelling Postlethwaite correctly without looking it up, first! So I’m gonna have a cookie. Or maybe a beer, later on.