Set amid the 1918 influenza, Coup! quite obviously parallels a certain more recent pandemic while also offering enough of a cultural remove to make this film more than merely a COVID commentary. In fact, writer-directors Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman insist that the pandemic theme in this breezy yet dark comedy is simply a device to isolate a particular group of characters in the film’s palatial setting, where its class-warfare satire can unfold as the established order is upended by unforeseen circumstance.
However, the tone of this film, which satirizes the hypocrisy of “limousine liberals” advocating from ivory towers for lockdowns and mask mandates in the name of safety for a working class whose livelihoods depend on businesses staying open, skews heavily populist. (Disgraced CNN journalist Chris Cuomo broadcasting from his basement in the Hamptons is even cited by the filmmakers as an influence.) Press notes may claim that the film is a Rorschach test of the viewer’s own preconceived political notions, but what results is a muddled satire with its thumb on the right side of the scale, undercutting absorbing performances from its two leads.
The target of much of the film’s scorn is prominent muckraker J.C. Horton (Billy Magnussen), who hides away at his summer mansion nestled in a hoity-toity island community of Egg Island while pecking away at his typewriter, unleashing screeds against Woodrow Wilson’s prioritization of war over the public health emergency ravaging the country. Through the help of an informant, he writes as though he himself is in the city at ground zero, bloodying his clothes alongside minorities and immigrants while tangling with authorities in violent protests, and not simply relaying info while ensconced in the creature comforts of his smoking jacket and velvet slippers. When his wife, Julie (Sarah Gadon), points out that despite his best intentions Horton is lying to the public, he insists that his lies are saving lives. Yet, the film makes clear that his incendiary yellow journalism may be destroying livelihoods in the process.
In fact, Coup! even opens with one such casualty. A man lies dead, sprawled across a tabletop with a blood-spattered letter, a glass of whiskey at his side and a bullet hole in his temple. His identity is in the process of being stolen by the man who will introduce himself as Floyd Monk (Peter Sarsgaard) after shaving and doctoring an I.D. photo in order to pass as the dead man in the open chef’s job at the Horton estate. He waltzes into this new gig dressed more like an eccentric drifter than a cook, and from the jump, he despises his employer, calling Horton a “nancy boy” under his breath and lamenting the house rules, most notably that “staff” (Horton self-righteously insists against referring to them as “servants”) are not be permitted to consume any alcohol.
As the influenza inevitably makes its way to the shores of Egg Island, Monk poisons the rigidly loyal housekeeper (Kristine Nielsen) with some toxic mushrooms in order to get her sent away to a hospital and proceeds to convince his fellow staff members – Turkish driver Kaan (Faran Tahir) and Black nanny Mrs. Tidwell (Skye P. Marshall) – to ask for a significant raise due to the peril of their duties as essential workers running errands in public. Soon, he’s able to convince Horton to move them all from the staff quarters into the mansion itself. He ingratiates himself with Julie and the children – who begin calling him Uncle Floyd – and even takes liberties to use Horton’s private indoor pool.
As businesses shut down and the ferry off the island remains docked due to the pandemic, food grows scarce, and Horton’s fervent vegetarianism – despite his fortune stemming from an inheritance from his meat-packing-magnate father – is challenged. Passive-aggressive toward his employer since his arrival, Monk takes this opportunity to tighten the screws, flexing his alpha-male muscles while bagging game and giving Horton the credit, further entrenching the muckraker with political aspirations into a mire of his own hypocrisy and deception and slowly driving him mad in the process.
Though they are inaccurate in implying their film is politically ambiguous, the filmmakers may be onto something with their Rorschach test analogy when it comes to viewer sympathies. We’re clearly led to favor Monk, the brash and charismatic grifter, whose rebellious streak and “eat the rich” mentality make him a disruptor of the established order. And we’re meant to dislike Horton, an effete, virtue-signaling, vegetarian, trust-fund-baby hypocrite who wants to be the next Upton Sinclair (Fisher Stevens even cameos as the legendary muckraker) or maybe even governor. But Monk is so slippery and unrelenting in his torment of Horton that the latter becomes largely sympathetic, and Monk is, after all, a liar himself and perhaps even a murderer. Both actors gleefully chew the scenery in these roles, with Magnussen playing against type in a role where he is not the aggressor and Sarsgaard clearly relishing playing such a mad bandit (he even gets to flash his own harmonica skills in the process). Gadon, meanwhile, is slightly underutilized in her dynamic performance as the complex Julie, a writer who sacrificed her own career in her marriage to Horton and who, against her better judgment, also falls under Monk’s spell.
Such complexities of character and blurred lines between virtue and villainy make for compelling cinema in most situations, and Coup! offers a bevy of levity and intrigue, but its muddled politics blunt its impact as a satire. Even as the feet of corpses jut out from the back of collection trucks, the film ripples with an anti-lockdown sentiment, as Horton’s progressivism is cast as malignant to a hardscrabble working class, advocating for the government to “take away” what real Americans worked so hard to “build up” as Sarsgaard’s character tells the lifeless body of the real Floyd Monk in the film’s opening scene. If the flu vaccine wasn’t invented until decades after the 1918 influenza, who knows what other government-overreach boogeymen would’ve been conjured up.
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment
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