Mark Reviews Movies: LADY OF THE MANOR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 16, 2021

A lady doesn't indulge in laughter, the ghost of a prim and proper 19th century woman explains, so a hypothetical lady of yore would be perfectly safe watching Lady of the Manor. It's the rare breed of comedy that feels simultaneously and equal parts lazy, as if nobody put much thought into it, and desperate, as if the filmmakers realized the veritable absence of comedy as the movie was being shot and edited.

Those filmmakers, apparently, went a long way to assembling a surprisingly notable cast to make something—anything—of this material. They're the brotherly duo of Christian and Justin Long, who share writing and directing credits on this, their first feature. The latter Long, of course, is best known as an actor—and a generally funny and amiable one, at that. His reputation might explain how the filmmaking pair managed to nab the likes of Melanie Lynskey, Judy Greer, and Ryan Phillippe for what looks, sounds, and plays like a quick and low-budget re-creation of a movie.

Lynskey portrays Hannah, a slacker and drug "deliverer" who lives in Savannah. After getting high and receiving instructions for an order of marijuana, Hannah mixes up the words "street" and "avenue," resulting in her coincidentally showing up at the location of a sting to arrest a potential child molester. The cops assume she's the one soliciting a minor, and if none of that sounds particularly amusing, at least there's a shot of the actual, potential child molester getting away to make the whole matter doubly depressing.

Anyway, Hannah gets out of jail, as long as she registers as a sex offender. Drowning her sorrows at a local bar, Tanner (Phillippe) offers her a job as a tour guide and a place to live at his historic family home. He fired the last tour guide for refusing to go out on a date with him. It's all, apparently, a con to have sex with her, which seems odd since Hannah doesn't appear to need much convincing from the moment she meets Tanner. Without all of these unlikely coincidences and contrivances, of course, there wouldn't be a story.

There isn't much of one even with those convoluted mechanics. Basically, Hannah makes a mockery of the late Lady Wadsworth (Greer), who appears to the tour guide as a phantom, scolds her lifestyle and personality and choices, and teaches her how to be more proper. Even before all of this, Hannah also catches the attention and affection of Max (Justin Long), a local history professor, for reasons that will have to remain a mystery.

The joke, obviously, is that Hannah is a mess, a constant swearer, a woman who likes sex, and all sorts of other things that deeply offend the aristocratic Lady Wadsworth. That's pretty much the only joke, apart from Tanner's shallow chicanery and Max's puppy-dog loyalty, and as soon as the gag runs its course, the rest of the humor amounts to some minor variations on reproaching Hannah's cursing, horniness, disorderliness, and, to add at least one more obvious joke into the mix, farting. It's definitely not a good sign that the fart jokes here are the ones that actually have a setup and punch line to them.

There's a plot—not that it matters—about who the true owners of the estate should be (It raises some issues about race that the movie glosses over or wholly ignores), but mostly, we're just watching Lynskey and Greer trying their hardest to cull laughs from repetitively dead-end material. Both of them are charming enough, at least, with Greer milking the dialect and physicality of the eponymous character, while Lynskey plays Hannah with a dopiness that downplays how irritating the character is on paper.

Everyone on screen attempts to compensate for the lack of real jokes or the constant recurrence of similar ones, which only becomes really embarrassing during the credits, when a series of outtakes shows how much effort went into getting what they actually produced. As filmmakers, the Long brothers play a similar game, trying to emphasize scenes with cartoony music and giving everything an unnaturally bright glow, which only serves to highlight how cheaply made the whole endeavor is. The lesson of Lady of the Manor, perhaps, is that, while you can fool good actors into a bad comedy, you can't fool your way into making a good one.

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