Naive optimism leads to folly in ‘Decline and Fall’
Biting wit and a farcically frothy plot make “Decline and Fall” a delight. The three-part miniseries, available Monday, May 15, on Acorn.tv, is so much fun, you’ll be disappointed when the third episode is over.
James Wood has done a beautiful job adapting the novel of the same name by the singular Evelyn Waugh. In fact, it was Waugh’s first published novel, and those who know his work will find familiar themes in the Acorn adaptation. Jack Whitehall stars as the almost indefatigable optimist Paul Pennyfeather, who mistakenly wanders into some late-night revelry at Scone College (a fictionalized stand-in for Oxford) that gets him “sent down” for dashing about the campus starkers.
He winds up in a very lowranking public school in Wales run by Dr. Fagan (David Suchet) who is desperate to marry his daughters off and isn’t much of a school administrator.
Pennyfeather isn’t much of a teacher either, but then again, Llanabba isn’t much of a school. No matter that he cannot speak German or play a musical in-
strument: He will be teaching German and music and running the physical education department at the school, which he does rather badly, but the rest of the faculty is so drunk, incompetent or both, no one cares.
Fellow teacher Grimes (Douglas Hodge) is never sober and very often caught “in the soup” — code for getting in trouble after being caught servicing hunky men.
Pennyfeather is adjusting to his new life, more or less, when he meets the beautiful, multiply married South American Margot Beste-Chetwynde (Eva Longoria), which is pronounced rather like “beast-cheating,” and her capable son Peter (Oscar Kennedy).
Pennyfeather is smitten with the lady, but his wide-eyed nature leads him straight to prison for “white slavery.”
The performances are exquisite, especially those of Whitehall, Suchet, Longoria and Kennedy, with great caricature works offered by Hodge and Stephen Graham, as Philbrick, a drunken teacher with a very cheap toupee.
The story is post-Dickensian, with a heavy reliance on coincidence and characters who are over the top in one way or another. The whole confection turns on how blindly trusting Pennyfeather is. He only sees the good in others, even when the bad is looking him straight in the face and taking undue advantage of him. All the better for our endless amusement.