Keeping Mum is a fun little film, with spot on performances by Maggie Smith, Rowan Atkinson and Kristen Scott Thomas and well why not . . . Patrick Swayze. The quaint charm and tongue-in-cheek foul play might have been a really effective film if not for clumsy direction and heavy-handed screenwriting. Everything was in place for this to be one of those devilish black comedies, but it was really executed as if it were being produced for the Disney Channel.

I'm not going to sweat playing spoiler, because the big reveal comes so early in the film that it's really not much of a secret. Rowan Atkinson is a Vicar Goodfellow in a rural English parrish, a decent and well meaning nebbish whose wife (Thomas) has become bored with her predictable lot and is thus contemplating a fling with local golf pro (an over the top and somewhat fun Swayze.) Their daughter Holly (Tamsin Egerton) is openly promiscuous with a revolving door collection of slacker boyfriends and their youngest son is having "bully trouble" at school. For his part Atkinson is blissfully oblivious due to his own insecurity as a sermonizer and plays against Mr. Bean type throughout.

Enter their new housekeeper Grace (Smith) who is perfect by all outward appearances and wastes no time acquainting herself with the problems and secret goings on of her new charges. The first indication that we're in for a black comedy comes when a bothersome and yappy neighborhood dog turns up missing. Things progress in a like manner with far fewer laughs than the set up promises and little of the cleverness of films that it aspires toward (Arsenic and Old Lace, Murder by Death). The biggest surprise for me was that the original screenplay was written by the brilliant and Pulitzer winning author of Nobody's Fool and Empire Falls Richard Russo. I can only hope that things went so badly wrong when director Niall Johnson (White Noise) rewrote the script and butchered the whole thing by his truly awful direction.

Again the acting was solid across the board and there was enough character substance developed to understand everyone's motives, but the black comedy aspect was hurried and stumbled so badly that it was clear that the fault was in the execution. There was no menace or malice and hence it ended up coming off more like a feeble feel good film than a savvy black comedy. What could and should have been a good bit of fiendish fun was merely okay. Due entirely to the likable cast.