‘Coup!’ Assessment: Peter Sarsgaard Is a Successful Impostor in a Droll and Breezy Tackle Class Battle

Though Coup! has a small forged and unfolds largely in a secluded mansion throughout the 1918 influenza pandemic, it packs numerous taste, suspense and droll comedy into its slim 97-minute operating time, making it enjoyable sufficient to deserve an exclamation level in its title. Peter Sarsgaard presents a sly, juicy efficiency as a shady chef who weasels his method into the house of an entitled younger inheritor (Billy Magnussen). Quickly, the upstart is popping the servants and members of the family in opposition to the hypocritical patriarch, who fancies himself a progressive. A collaborative effort between writer-directors Austin Stark (The God Committee, The Runner) and Joseph Schuman, this satirical work is hardly profound or delicate in regards to the parallels with the present-day class battle, but it surely wears its screw-the-rich subtext with insouciant breeziness.

Within the opening minutes, Sarsgaard’s Floyd Monk is met shaving off his beard and styling his mustache, seemingly to make himself look extra like the person mendacity lifeless within the subsequent room with a bullet in his head, whose passport Floyd takes. Solely a lot later will we find out about his relationship to the lifeless man. However provided that background checks weren’t really easy to execute within the 1910s, particularly throughout a pandemic, Floyd has no downside passing himself off because the chef an employment company has discovered for the Horton household, residents of a mock Palladian mansion on Egg island, a ship trip away from New York Metropolis. The top of the household, Jay (Magnussen, who, like Sarsgaard, can be an government producer right here), has inherited the property from his father, a meat-packing magnate whom Jay however uncovered as a nasty employer within the pages of The Progressive Tribune, the newspaper for which he writes.

Though he has vowed to present the property to the poor sometime, Jay isn’t so pure as to refuse to dwell there now together with his spouse, Julie (Sarah Gadon), a author in her personal proper, and their two younger youngsters, Tom (Callum Vinson) and Molly (Willa Dunn). Additionally residing on the property are the servants — no, scratch that, the employees, as Horton insists they’re referred to as: Irish housekeeper Mrs. McMurray (Kristine Nielsen), Black maid Mrs. Tidwell (Skye P. Marshall), whose husband (in contrast to Jay) is preventing abroad, and chauffeur-butler Kaan (Faran Tahir), a Turkish-immigrant. All of them dwell in a small cottage down the hill whereas the household enjoys the mansion, with its 12 bedrooms and beautiful indoor swimming pool that solely the household might use. (The precise pool is positioned not within the New Jersey home seen however in one other historic constructing, Pleasantdale Chateau, a marriage venue in West Orange, New Jersey, and sure, presents of lodging could be gratefully obtained.)

Floyd shortly settles in and wins spherical Julie, the children, Mrs. Tidwell and Kaan together with his cooking, card tips and breezy Southern allure. Jay, who spends his days writing muckraking anti-Woodrow Wilson journalism that feigns reportage from the pandemic-infected streets of New York however is definitely written in an opulent library at his dwelling, is much less simply charmed. The indomitable Mrs. McMurray additionally shortly spots that there’s one thing fishy about Floyd, and never in a culinary sense. A number of foraged mushrooms in her soup, nonetheless, ship Mrs. McMurray off to the hospital, and Floyd proceeds together with his quiet coup, rallying the opposite servants to ask for higher wages and lodgings as a primary step. When the pandemic cuts off entry to Egg Island, the necessity to forage for meals turns into extra pressing and Jay, a staunch vegetarian, is compelled to let the youngsters eat meat. His authority is regularly chipped away little by little by the wily chef, who is aware of simply play the state of affairs to his benefit.

Clearly, the bizarre combination of isolation, paranoia and rusticated liberation will probably be acquainted to anybody who spent the COVID-19 pandemic in a bubble, particularly if that bubble was out within the countryside. Stark and Schuman are fairly frank within the movie’s press notes about being impressed by tales of Manhattanites fleeing to the Hamptons and upstate New York, the place the same old hierarchies felt challenged by the disaster. Setting the story in 1918 as a substitute of the more moderen previous presents a possibility to look at each how little and the way a lot America has modified in a century, whereas additionally affording an opportunity to revel within the music, Edwardian fashions and Belle Epoque luxurious of the interval. It’s additionally a possibility to rope in Fisher Stevens for a cameo because the progressive author Upton Sinclair, and that’s fairly a deal with.