(1995, 99 min) Do you like English movies? Well, if you don’t, do you at least like making fun of English people? Oh, good. I do, too.
Aren’t English people from the olden days (ie: before 1960) so funny, with their stuffiness and propriety and "tea" being "lunch" and "supper" being "dinner"? With their flats and petrol and lifts, their being permanently flustered (no, Hugh Grant didn’t invent it) and the men all calling each other "old boy"? With their nervous meetings and awkward goodbyes and lack of visible emotion? They’re so charming!
I had the privilege of having read the novel "Cold Comfort Farm" less than a week before watching the film version, so I can tell you for a fact that the movie perfectly captures the book in its entirety. I was extremely impressed. It didn’t make me laugh quite so much as the book did, being that I laughed two times instead of three. It is an old book, you know, not a David Sedaris pseudo-memoir, but it was great all the same.
Stella Gibbons, a moderately successful journalist and book reviewer, wrote "Cold Comfort" in 1932 and it was an instant hit. She went on to write dozens of other books, none of which were as popular. The book has the distinction of being a successful parody of a genre that nobody (especially in this country) really remembers, but it is clearly parodying something, which makes it work. The biggest names to come out of this genre were D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and the Bronte sisters. Tragedy in the country life was the common thread between them…along with the subtext of nature representing sexual desires. Or something like that. The only thing I remember from reading "Wuthering Heights" in high school was that the moors were a metaphor for Heathcliff’s animal brutality, so that seems about right. In fact, one character, a writer, spends most of his time roaming around the countryside, pointing out how much the hills look like breasts.
The 1995 movie stars a young and surprisingly talented Kate Beckinsale (before she got hair extensions, tanned herself into a moccasin and married an animal-print-wearing Hollywood director), Joanna Lumley from "Absolutely Fabulous", Ian McKellan from X-Men and Stephen Fry from Wilde. They’re good too, except that McKellan could use subtitles. I wouldn’t have understood a word of his dialogue if I hadn’t already known what he was going to say.
One aspect of the book that the film ignores is that it was actually set in an alternate future timeline. Written in 1932 but taking place sometime in the '50s, Gibbons correctly guesses that World War II has taken place already (although she gets the continent wrong) and imagines the everyday use of video phones and personal airplanes. Most recent adaptations overlook this for obvious reasons.
The movie begins when Flora Poste (Beckinsale), having just nonchalantly attended her parents’ funeral and found out about her measly inheritance, decides to find extended family members to take her in. She chooses the Starkadders, despite their obvious backwardness, and goes to live with them at Cold Comfort Farm. The farm is a run-down, gloomy mess where the disheveled bunch is controlled by their matriarch Ada Doom. Ada inspires devotion through her apparent madness, supposedly brought on by a traumatic experience she had as a little girl when she "saw something nasty in the woodshed." Pretty much every Starkadder needs some major personal help. Seth, the aimless local stud whose only interest is the "talkies," knocks up the servant girl every spring; Adam, the 90-something farm hand, washes dishes with a twig; and Elfine, the free-spirited and beautiful teenager, just needs to get the hell out of there.
Flora sets about tackling everybody’s problems in her calm, efficient and orderly manner. She hopes that by successfully changing the Starkadders it will give her enough life experience to write a great novel when she’s fifty.
It’s a charming, quaint little story that’s also really funny. And by funny I don’t mean funny like the 40-Year-Old Virgin or watching Dumb and Dumber when you were fifteen, I mean the kind of funny when you’re not actually laughing but just kind of grinning inside. It’s a nice, pleasant feeling that may be unique to certain types of subtle humor. Or it may be the feeling you get when you realize you’re one step closer to completely forgetting having watched Love, Actually.
© TLA Entertainment Group
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