The atrocious unsocial behaviour of a group of very wealthy privileged college-age offspring of England’s landed gentry whose utter contempt for the poor is matched by their assumed rights of trashing and vandalising other people’s properties, seems a odd topic for a movie. It’s even more unbelievable when we learn that the current crop of top ranking Conservative politicians (including the Prime Minister) who are desperately clinging to their fragile grasp on power by claiming to be ‘of the common man’ were actually members of the outrageous private Club that this movie was based upon.
Their disgusting initiation process leads up to the Club’s grand banquet but as they have been banned from so many city restaurants and hotels after trashing them ruthlessly, they are having to resort to holding it in the private dining room of a rural pub way out in the country. The Landlord is anxious to ingratiate himself with what he thought were a group of young entrepreneurs who were only too happy to over-pay him to dine there. The highlight of the supper was meant to be a 10-bird roast and a prostitute to service all of them. When neither of these turn out as expected these nasty spoilt brats now completely drunk step up their raucous behavior a notch or two before they start destroying everything in the room. When the horrified Landlord comes into complain, he becomes the target of their sheer blood-mindless behaviour and they end up beating him into a pulp.
It seems odd to concede that we are such a class ridden society and that although we are indignant that one small section of society still believe that their so-called superiority is a birth-given right to ride roughshod over the rest of us, we are nonetheless not surprised by any of their behavior. Whilst it may not shock us Brits that when push comes to shove this handful of aristocrats behave in a similar manner to that as football hooligans at the other end of the social scale, it will horrify most of America who want to believe that they are in fact all as well-bred and overly polite like the folks in Downton Abbey.
