Cold Comfort Farm: 1995, dir. John Schlesinger. Seen on DVD (Feb. 26).
Cold Comfort Farm is a lovely little movie. I want to buy a copy of the DVD so I can put it in the rotation as one of my background movies. I can see myself watching it, or semi-watching-and-listening while I work on the computer or clean the house, many more times.
I loved the book by Stella Gibbons very much when I read it for the first time last year, and have reread the book several times since then. It is a charming book, obviously inspired by Jane Austen, and I was eager to see the film adaptation. I hoped I wouldn’t hate it.
The movie makes a few changes and even some improvements over the book. Gibbons set her book in “the near future” and made some predictions that turned out to be rather silly (she had no idea about World War II, she thought everyone would be traveling via private plane, and so on). The filmmakers sensibly set the movie in the 1930s, when Gibbons wrote the book. (They did keep Charles’ plane, though, because the ending wouldn’t be at all right without it.)
The film also makes the heroine, Flora Poste, a wannabe-writer who occasionally sits down and produces rather overblown prose. In the book, Flora says she will tell everyone she is a writer who is gathering material, and that will be her excuse for not having to find a job of any kind. However, modern audiences might not understand or sympathize with a woman who doesn’t want to do much of anything beyond organizing the lives of everyone around her in order to make everything tidy and workable. Fortunately, the author subplot is very minor and Flora’s occasional fits of writing do not interfere with her primary occupation.
The storyline is quite simple: Flora (Kate Beckinsale) learns after her parents die that she has very little to live on, and so she decides that she will live off her relatives. Her friend Mary Smiling (Joanna Lumley) warns her that she will soon tire of the awful relatives and come back to London to find a nice job, but Flora is off to Cold Comfort Farm in very rural Sussex. Her relatives turn out to lead very messy lives indeed, so Flora sets about fixing everything. Unlike Emma Woodhouse, Flora is never humbled or thwarted, and she happily helps everyone get their lives in order without any major mishaps.
Obviously, this isn’t a movie for everyone, and if the above summary gave you the screaming fidgets, you should probably stay away. If you liked Douglas McGrath’s adaptation of Emma, however, this is the same kind of good fun. (I know Kate Beckinsale was the title character in a BBC adaptation of Emma, but I found that adaptation amazingly unfunny and rather blah. This movie is much better.)
The acting is fine, although I thought Miriam Margolyes somewhat miscast as Mrs. Beetle, because I’ve always seen Mrs. Beetle as a skinny hatchet-faced but pleasant sort of woman. Ian McKellen is wonderful, Stephen Fry is perfect, and Joanna Lumley is slightly disconcerting because she wears so much more makeup than anyone else in the film that she looks a bit like a man in drag. Christopher Bowen is a little too stiff and upper-crusty for me to like his character, Charles Fairford, as much as I should have, which is a shame because we want Flora to like someone, well, a little more attractive. Kate Beckinsale is a very believable and likeable Flora Poste.
I have to note that I don’t usually like gimmicky music in movies, but this movie had the funniest and most appropriate use ever of “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. I laughed my ass off. Beautiful moment.
Surprisingly enough to me, the movie was directed by John Schlesinger, best known for movies like Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man. I remember having to review Pacific Heights when I was in college and disliking it entirely. I don’t know what made him choose this project, but it is obviously done with such care and affection that I imagine he might have liked this book a lot too.
In short, Cold Comfort Farm is just the kind of movie I like to curl up on the sofa and watch by myself, and one of the better adaptations I’ve seen lately. When you love the book, and then you love the movie too, you can’t ask for much more.
I loved this movie too, but what seems to stick out in my memory is the washing stick that they use for dishes. Flora presents him with a lovely little dish cleaner and he never uses it. Remonds me of my stepfather. My mom and I joke about his ‘dish stick’ all the time… =;)
I love that movie and book. “Worst fears realized. Send gum boots, ” is my favorite line. The novel is a parody of Mary Webb’s Precious Bane.
I haven’t read the book, though I keep meaning to, but the movie is one of my favorites. A friend of mine used to call me up and tell me about how she was showered in “nature’s fecund blessing.” I love Stephen Fry!
Um, isn’t Joanna Lumley a man in drag? She nearly always looks to be.
A couple of thoughts:
1. For those who don’t know, this was made before anyone knew who Kate Beckinsale was (and way before she squandered all her talent potential).
2. Jette completely neglected to mention the steamy Rufus Sewell.
3. OK, so if this strikes you as Emma-like, Miss Austen, how is it that I like both this book AND this film immensely, but you saw how I reacted to the Gwyneth version of Emma (and, at that, it was a better reaction than I have to the literary original)? If this is an Emma-like plot, then how come it doesn’t annoy the piss out of me like Emma herself does?