(out of four)

By David N. Butterworth

On paper, to use a decidedly British turn of phrase, the movie version of Stella Gibbons' 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm had all the potential for a wickedly funny comedy of manners: a splendid ensemble cast, delightful source material, and an accomplished director at the helm (John Schlesinger, who made Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man). On screen, however, this made-for-British-television adaptation falls flat on its bum.

With the current rash of Jane Austen translations making the movie circuit, American audiences are especially receptive to Anglophilic period pieces–the Cold Comfort crowd at the Ritz were in hysterics! While not in the Austen mold, Gibbons’ novel was a classic comedic send-up of the larger-than-life romantic dramas penned by Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence, and Malcolm Bradbury’s screenplay is peppered with Gibbons’ deliciously deranged dialogue. But ultimately the ruin lies in the production’s attempt to turn dry satire into broad farce. What went wrong is not exactly clear, but at the very least a comedy of manners should be funny. Someone should have told the Channel Twelvers that a British accent isn’t enough.

The story starts out with our meticulously proper heroine Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale, the ingenue in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing) recently orphaned and left to subsist on a pittance. This strong-willed London sophisticate is forced to turn to her rural Sussex ancestors for support, the dark and dingy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm. This unglamorous assortment of singularly British eccentrics go about their business quite without the social graces to which Miss Poste is accustomed. No problem there, though; Flora–a young woman obsessed by "higher common sense" and zealous tidiness–simply spreads her influence to educate and modernize the occupants of this cursed homestead, wherein lies the bulk of our story.

The able-bodied performers do what’s expected of them with, as British humor dictates, endless repetition: the gloom-laden Ada Doom (Sheila Burrell) gets excess mileage out of her "I saw something nasty in the woodshed" mantra, which has kept her attic-bound since childhood; Adam Lambsbreath (Freddie Jones) makes full use of his reference to Flora as "Robert Poste’s child." And everyone, regularly and in unison, reminds each other that "there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm."

Rounding out the cast is Eileen Atkins as Judith Starkadder (who looks like she might be Lou Reed’s mom), and Ian McKellen as Amos, a fire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons invariably include "something about burning." Joanna Lumley (best known Stateside for her role as Patsy in the acerbic British television import, Absolutely Fabulous) plays Flora’s socialite friend, Mrs. Smiling, tsk-tsk’ing and raising her eyebrows at everything bucolic And the ever-affected Stephen Fry (Peter’s Friends) puts in a token appearance as Flora’s unrequited love interest, the smitten Mr. Mybug. As hamming it up down on the farm goes, this movie gives Babe a run for its money!

And then there’s Beckinsale, pretty and charming and unflappable as the influential Flora amidst all this chaos.

Flora wishes to learn about Real Life, collecting material for the novel she is writing. She labors over her humorously clichéd prose–"The golden orb had almost disappeared behind the interlacing fingers of the hawthorne"–while around her the bumpkin cousins spout poetry unconsciously–"I expect there’ll be a little beetle soon now that the sukebind is flowering." For Flora, even natural orders such as pregnancy seem "untidy." 

Where's La Boeuf?

© 1984-2006 David N. Butterworth
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Last modified: August 04, 2006