Stream It Or Skip It?

The cinema landscape as of late has been heavily populated with enough eat-the-rich stories to choke out every billionaire on earth. The latest is Coup! (now streaming on Hulu), which smacks of wearying familiarity, not just in the trappings of its subgenre, but it’s also a Covid movie. In its favor, though, is an ever-entertaining Peter Sarsgaard in the lead, playing a twinkle-in-his-eye rabblerouser who sets his sights on a big fat phony ripe to be shish-kabobed. Is his amusing performance enough to make the movie viable viewing? Let’s find out.

COUP!: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Right below the seam of the chef’s hat is a bullet hole. Unfortunately, the hat is still on a man’s head. So it goes, right? Another man (Sarsgaard) absconds with the dead chef’s passport, shaving down to a mustache and smudging the photo so he can now assume the identity of Floyd Monk. And so we will heretofore refer to him as such. New Floyd sneaks Old Floyd’s body onto a police truck piled with the remains of poor souls who succumbed to the flu pandemic. Floyd Monk is dead, long live Floyd Monk. Flies buzz loudly and mercilessly around the bodies. It’s 1918.

Elsewhere, in a sprawling country manse on an island, JC Horton (Billy Magnussen) pounds away at a typewriter. He’s a writer for The Progressive Times who uses his column space for righteous screeds against the Woodrow Wilson administration, condemning it for its handling of the pandemic. Horton believes everything needs to be shut down and stumps for immigrants, the poor and people of color. He reports from the frontlines of riots in the streets. Yet he never leaves his cushy home, where he isolates with his wife, Julie (Sarah Gadon), and their two children. He swims in an indoor pool and employs a staff – do not call them servants, because that’d be not particularly progressive – to care for the children and cook fancy vegetarian meals. And Horton has his sights on bigger things than being a newspaperman, namely, running for office. “We are conscientious objectors,” explains Julie, somewhere between the soup and main courses.

Horton’s new cook is our curious, charismatic friend Floyd Monk, who carries with him an air of mischief bordering on malevolence. What’s he building in there? “In there” being his head, of course. He plants the seeds of revolt in the minds of the other staff members, and the one who isn’t on board with his notions gets poison-mushroom’d and sent to the hospital from which she shan’t return, because the ferries have been shut down. Then Floyd starts entertaining the children in a manner that Horton can’t because he’s so prim and proper, and letting Julie drop in on card games with the staff. What’s next? Upstaging Horton during a very manly deer hunting trip? Cuckolding him? This Horton guy is quite the sleazy hypocrite. It’d be a shame if someone yanked his draws down in front of everyone else, wouldn’t it?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Some of the infiltrate-from-the-inside fodder of Saltburn and Parasite meets a bit – but just a bit! – of the puking from Triangle of Sadness.

Performance Worth Watching: Floyd Monk is in the upper-middle tier of rogues in Sarsgaard’s gallery, and he plays the character as part pirate, part con artist, an agent of chaos with a secret agenda. 

Memorable Dialogue: A classic mutter-under-your-breath-and-“correction” exchange:

Floyd: Kiss my ass, nancy boy.

Horton: What?

Floyd: Why don’t we get sassafras for the boy?

Sex and Skin: Nothing worth mentioning.

Our Take: Let’s face it, writer/directors Joseph Schuman and Austin Stark aren’t saying, spoofing or satirizing anything we haven’t seen or heard before about pandemics, politics and the economic-slash-cultural divide. It all sucks and is full of bad actors acting in bad faith with bad intentions, and we theoretically should cheer any incidence of them showing their asses to the world. It’s a familiar quasi-revenge fantasy of the type that could use a little artful freshening in the realm of cinema, and doesn’t really get that here. It’s not about money, but power and control, and all that. Some will be frustrated that this doesn’t really take a stand politically, by its somewhat scattershot satirical approach, but frankly, in a world ruled by black-and-white extremity, a little “political incoherence” is just fine. People and politics should be hard to pin down. Complexity skews closer to truth. 

The filmmakers are thankfully smarter and savvier in their casting than their thematically derivative screenplay. Sarsgaard-as-scoundrel is always a welcome sight, the actor working the ethical gray areas with savvy charm, and Magnussen is delightful as a slightly haughty spineless worm. Gadon could use a more full-bodied character, one that isn’t quite so deferent to the whims of the plot, but she makes the most of the few instances she gets to show Julie’s rougher edges. There’s a nagging sense that Faran Tahir and Skye P. Marshall’s roles as poorly paid servants is just tokenism in a movie that seems to be critical of such things. But the members of this talented ensemble make the most of their moments, underscoring the notion that Coup! is more of a lightly conscientious amusement than a scathing op-ed.

Our Call: The spirited, lightly underplayed performances make Coup! worth a look. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.