Cold Comfort Farm

If you are searching for comparisons to help you decide whether to watch "Cold Comfort Farm" imagine a slightly older "Pollyanna" going to live on a rundown version of "Babe's" English farm with a strange and bleak collection of her country cousins.

This is an excellent and very earthy adaptation of Stella Gibbon's 1932 satirical novel (which itself is an odd marriage of Hardy and Wodehouse). Where the village pub is named "The Condemned Man" and the cows are named Aimless, Feckless, Graceless, and Pointless. Both the novel and its adaptation are joyfully depressing and packed with literary eccentricity and subtle humor. If you like "Faulty Towers" then you can expect to get off on the humor. But if you prefer "Hot Shots! Part Deux", you should probably pass on "Cold Comfort Farm".

There are three possible viewer reactions: It's not funny. I didn't figure out it was a comedy until halfway through but then I found it hilarious. I couldn't stop laughing.

Kate Beckinsale plays Flora Poste (always referred to by her relatives as Robert Poste's daughter), a recently orphaned 19 year old who chooses to live with relatives (the Starkadders) she has never met, at gloomy Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. Beckinsale, even more radiant than usual, pulls off a nice characterization of the resourceful yet snobbish heroine. Like Pollyanna, she is a catalyst for positive change, but they are calculated changes. Her instinctive snobbishness (Beckinsale has a real talent for this) is played for laughs since everyone would feel a bit superior and distanced from this eccentric collection of misfits.

The adaptation nicely incorporates Gibbons's subtle parody of Jane Austen romantic clichés, from the controlling madwoman in the attic to wood nymph poetess, to the quivering parishioners. Even the production design is a funny send-up of the standard BBC mini-series look.

This is really a terrific production, doubly so for Beckinsale fans.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

The first time I saw CCF I walked out of the theater wondering whether or not I liked it. The more I thought about it and a couple rentals later and I love this movie. It's funny on so many different levels you've really got to dedicate a few viewings before passing final judgment.

This is one of the few movies I'd put in the same category as "Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" - movies that get funnier the more times you watch them.

I first saw Cold Comfort Farm way back in the early 70's on TV, but this latest version is so much funnier. Kate Beckinsale makes a wonderful bossy "take charge" Flora, and everyone else in the cast is just hilarious. Eileen Atkins' scenery chewing when her son, played by Rufus Sewell, was leaving home to become a Hollywood film star, just about had me in hysterics. The dread menacing atmosphere, the dark hints about something seen in the woodshed, and the general squalor of a once prosperous family gone to ruin are all conveyed in a humourous but not slapstick or farcical way. The Starkadders mooch about muttering threateningly until Flora eventually sets them all on the right path to recovering prosperity. Flora is the kind of upbeat heroine who would take a hot cup of cocoa to Dracula "because he is probably cold after all that time in the tomb." A very enjoyable film for those who like something different.

Most movie versions of books are disappointing because a good book is always a far richer experience, but this one doesn't shame its source. In fact it's an amusing romp, largely because all the actors are letter perfect -- not easy with a broadly satiric story like this one. Flora Poste's romantic notions actually produce positive results with the loutish Starkadders, such as matching the etiolated Elfine with her true love and sending the smoldering Seth off to become an American film star, while Flora herself ends the movie linked to her own very suitable suitor. Dialogue and motion picture scenery cannot reproduce the exquisitely sly writing of Stella Gibbons, however, so if you liked this movie, by all means read the 1932 book. It's a classic parody of rustic melodrama.

Absolutely terrific movie is an interesting take on the popular theme of people who come into a mess of unhappiness and create joy. Often these movies rely on a central character who is magical, or has great charm and a love for life, but Flora achieves her ends through pure English practicality, and it is very amusing to see someone approaching misery as a mess to be cleaned up. Flora, excellently portrayed by Beckinsale, is pretentious and rather smug but also well-meaning and likable. In a way she seems to be the personification of British imperialism, although that's probably a bit of a stretch.

Much of the fun of the movie is the ridiculous level of misery and squalor represented by Cold Comfort Farm, which is a parody of the sort of grim worlds one can find from writers like Dickens. Eileen Atkins does a great job, but then they all do. The only real weak point in the movie is Mybug, who seems completely unnecessary. Perhaps he was a significant character who served some purpose in the novel, but here he is just this annoying peripheral character, and had he been cut entirely out of the movie it would have been all the better for it (although I generally like Stephen Fry). In spite of that, an excellent film.