During an early scene in Savage House, which takes place during the Jacobite Risings, a character picks up and reads from a periodical essay. Full disclosure, having written my PhD on essay periodicals published during the Jacobite Risings this was a moment where I felt strongly that this film has been made, very inexplicably, for me specifically. This likely has some sway on my verdict as a reviewer (I absolutely loved it), and might also offer some explanation for why, as an advocate of this film, I find myself in quite a small minority.
Although everybody agrees its stars deliver exceptional performances, Savage House has not enjoyed a warm reception from reviewers, with Tim Robey of The Telegraph going as far as to suggest that the film’s ‘putrid stylings’ make it ‘impossible to enjoy.’ Most reviewers seem in agreement that the film’s grimy interest in disgusting and decaying bodies, rotten artifices and seemingly endless quantities of actual human excrement, have resulted in a “rancid” and “rotten period drama” whose “goofy pseudo-gravitas” belongs “in the Bargain Bin.”
However, for the connoisseur of actual eighteenth-century literature, the film’s relentless obsession with abject bodily emissions feels more familiar. Indeed, after decades of Jane Austen adaptations which seek to sanitise even their own author’s subject matter in service of this image of a buttoned up eighteenth century perpetually subjected to hyperbolic notions of politeness and decency, this reviewer actually found this fidelity to early eighteenth-century sensibilities refreshing.
Robey suggests that the film’s scatological impulses render it “low brow”, and that the film misses an opportunity to deliver a “deliciously dark satire” to instead “revel in showing us exactly where the steaming bed pans get emptied every day.” To which I say, try telling that to Jonathan Swift (who, rather tantalisingly, almost appears in the film as a dinner guest). Swift’s scatology is shocking and satirical at the same time, usually serving to collapse the distance between social performance and biological reality. The elegant Celia of “The Lady’s Dressing Room” famously becomes shocking not because she is filthy but because she turns out to possess a body at all. Savage House deploys bodily degradation in much the same way, exposing the fragility of the identities its characters struggle so desperately to maintain.
The film follows Sir Chauncey Savage, a gambler and social climber, and his wife, Lady Savage, a similarly incorrigible rascal who has watched as her husband squanders their fortune, as they desperately attempt to ready their crumbling estate ahead of an unanticipated visit from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. The result is a cascading sequence of scandals, illnesses, deceptions and catastrophes, culminating in the visit itself which, by the time it finally arrives, is as dreaded as it is eagerly anticipated. Structurally, the film is a very conventional farce which, in seemingly finding the principle of Chekhov’s gun wilfully inadequate as an engine for tension, stuffs itself full of various land minds patiently waiting to explode in the final act: Chauncey’s untreated gout is getting worse, Lady Savage’s affair with their valet is on the cusp of discovery, a smallpox epidemic and the Jacobite disorder draw nearer and there’s an eclipse at the end of the week that many fear will release untold evil upon the world.
The film’s central preoccupations are again familiar to readers of eighteenth-century literature: the gulfs that exist between appearance and reality, vice and virtue, and between self and society. Indeed, in a not especially subtle instance of visual imagery, the film opens with a servant turning a rancid apple displayed in a bowl of fruit so that the rot is concealed from view. These thematic interests also foreground an impressive range of intertexts, all of which are woven into a densely layered treat for people like you and me (and a literal mountain of excrement for everybody else).
The film’s most important intertext is Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, which is both name-checked and restaged at various points in the film. Like Thomas Rakewell, Chauncey Savage is defined by appetite: for alcohol, gambling, sex, and status. More importantly, both narratives organise themselves around a satirical logic in which private vice becomes publicly visible. The film’s escalating humiliations function much like Hogarth’s use of caricature and exaggeration, each disaster exposing another layer of social pretence until the protagonist’s carefully maintained identity collapses altogether. In one particularly hilarious moment, Chauncey stands before his wife on the morning of the Duke and Duchess’s visit, hobbled by gout and clutching a stinking, gangrenous wound where his arm was amputated a day earlier, and asks “Do you think anybody will notice?”.
Alongside references to Swift and Hogarth, the film’s narrator channels that distinctive, playfully metafictive voice of Henry Fielding’s novels, with Chauncey himself resembling a young Tom Jones in the flashbacks depicting his former life as a highwayman and con-artist (in fact, there’s more than a little something of John Gay’s highwayman Macheath from The Beggar’s Opera in Chancey’s early scenes). Fielding’s influence is felt again in the final act, when two grotesque Jacobite ne’er-do-wells infiltrate Savage House just in time for the party. With their evil sneers, eye patches and sinister, hobbling gaits, these two owe far more to the satirical caricatures of Fielding’s The Jacobite’s Journal than any historical reality. Indeed, this fidelity to the representations that occur in eighteenth-century literature over historical accuracy (whatever that is) is a theme throughout the film, and perhaps suggests another reason it has left some reviewers baffled.
The question is not whether Savage House accurately reproduces life in eighteenth-century England. It plainly does not. Its world is too concentrated, too grotesque and too cartoonishly catastrophic. Like Swift, Fielding and Hogarth before it, Savage House achieves its effects through exaggeration and distortion. It seems to be enthralled, in fact, with the ways eighteenth-century satirists imagined and caricatured their world. Most period dramas purport to be reconstructions of the past. Savage House attempts something more unusual: a reconstruction of the eighteenth-century’s own satirical imagination.