'Lady Of The Manor' Is A Wayward Haunted Comedy [Review]

Awkwardly bridging the gap between “My Fair Lady” retelling and an episode of “Southern Charm,” Justin and Christian Long’s directorial debut, “Lady of the Manor,” is both a southern-friend romantic comedy and “Casper”-esque tale of ghostly friendship. Mining broad comedy out of the story of a wayward stoner Hannah (Melanie Lynskey— proving that she owed the Longs a favor) who attempts to reform her lazy ways, with the help of the spectral Lady Wadsworth (Judy Greer – essentially playing an antebellum Judy Greer), with a love triangle thrown in to pad out the runtime, the Longs’ debut film may be Frankensteined together from disparate genres. Still, it also is an occasionally delightful, sometimes funny, but also just often dull comedy that, ultimately, wastes a game cast on underdeveloped material.

Featuring a surprisingly jam-packed plot, “Lady of the Manor” follows Hannah just as her drug-delivery business is upended by a “To Catch a Predator”-like sting that forces her to register as a sex offender and causes her more established boyfriend to dump her in the process. Feeling low, she goes out on a solo drunken night in Savannah, GA (really Florida doubling for Savannah and looking every bit like Florida) and catches the eye of man-child Tanner Wadworth (Ryan Phillippe — either the best or worst thing in this movie, I still can’t decide). Wanting to hook up with Hannah, Tanner offers her a place to live at his family’s mansion and a job to go along with it. Relocated to the Wadsworth Mansion, she moves into Lady Wadsworth’s old room and. every morning dresses up as the Lady to give tours to bored tourists. Of course, it isn’t long until the actual Lady Wadsworth takes offense to Hannah’s historically inaccurate tours and overall loose morals, haunting her in the process.

Soon, the two form a quasi-friendship as Lady Wadsworth teaches Hannah to become a more refined lady, and Hannah teaches the ghost to relax just a little bit. Thrown in for good measure is a love triangle between Hannah, Tanner, and Justin Long’s Harvard history professor – who is teaching in the South, for some reason – Max. If that weren’t enough, Christian and Justin Long introduce a series of subplots dealing with Lady Wadsworth’s (possible) murder and a lost will that may explain the rightful heirs to the Wadsworth mansion.

For a film so short, running just over 90 minutes, “Lady of the Manor” is overloaded with so much plot and supporting characters that it often feels like the film is running in multiple different directions at once. Starting in 1875, before jumping into the present, Longs’ film ostensibly follows Hannah as she learns to take better care of herself, but also feels the need to tack on a murder, backstory about Gen. Sherman, and odd commentary about postbellum reparations, all of which the film that is truly ill-equipped to mine. Whatever nascent socio-political commentary that Justin and Christian Long wanted to telegraph is, often, lost in a series of fart and sex jokes.

Which, on their own, is fine, as long as those jokes land. For “Lady of the Manor,” that batting average is probably a little less than .500, as Lynsky perfects a neurotic stoner persona that splits the difference between her characters on “Two and a Half Men” and “Togetherness.” Besides Phillipe’s weird go-for-broke Southern energy, she really is one of the best parts of the film, playing up the physical comedy while also grounding the – somewhat extreme – change that her character undergoes as she becomes wrapped up in a case of historical detection. On the other hand, Greer’s penchant for fish-out-of-water comedy works well, as she slowly acclimates to the current time period. Long, pulling double-duty essentially plays a minor variation of his bumbling good-guy routine.

Much like their previously written film, 2013’s “A Case of You,” which can be best termed as a stalker rom-com, the two Long brothers haven’t exactly figured out how to fuse disparate genres together in a way that feels naturalistic. Instead, we are given one-third romantic comedy, another-third detective story, and a final third “Drunk History” farce. The latter third, perhaps, works best but is often sidelined for an underdeveloped romance and an even weirder mystery. There isn’t really anything egregiously terrible about “Lady of the Manor,” but there is really nothing particularly memorable about the film either. [C]