★★☆☆☆
A towering, at times monumentally good central performance from the character actor Roger Allam stands at the heart of The Hippopotamus, but it is entirely alone. This is a belated adaptation of Stephen Fry’s 1994 satire about the investigation of apparent miracles on a country estate.
Much of Fry’s occasionally preachy polemic (rationality: good, spirituality: bad) has been jettisoned, along with the 1990s London media milieu. Instead all energy has been re-routed directly to Allam, as the drunken, sewer-mouthed theatre critic and antihero Ted Wallace, who swans around the ornate Swafford Hall manor house (actual location: West Wycombe Park, in Buckinghamshire), and simply regurgitates enormous chunks of Fry’s often startlingly savage prose, albeit with magnificent verve and comic timing.
Wallace is ostensibly on the hunt for hints of the miraculous among the “quirky” Swafford Hall denizens, including grumpy patriarch Michael Logan (Matthew Modine, shockingly miscast) and his sex-obsessed son David (Tommy Knight, struggling). But the narrative drive is so lax (“How is someone supposed to investigate nothing in particular?” asks Wallace. Quite), and the direction (from novice John Jencks) so haphazard that everything slowly stumbles to a halt amid pratfalls, Agatha Christie parodies and a truly terrible fellatio gag. Allam’s performance deserved better.
15, 89min