*** (out of ****)
Starring Kate Beckinsale, Eileen Atkins, Sheila Burrell, Stephen Fry, Freddie Jones, Joanna Lumley, Ian McKellan, Rufus Sewell
Directed by John Schlesinger & written for the screen by Malcolm Bradbury, from the novel by Stella Gibbons
1995
95 min PG
“Cold Comfort Farm” is a charming, low-key collision between the gothic and the Roaring Twenties. The voice of modernity wanders into a dilapidated country manor that’s like something out of Edgar Alan Poe and declares, very Englishly, “no, this shan’t do at all.” Except “at all” sounds like “atoll.” At Cold Comfort Farm, dread is the chief pastime. It is awash with dark secrets from the past, a crazy old aunt who never leaves her room, a lusty young son who regularly knocks up the help, arranged marriages, hints of incest, and faces that are always kind of dirty. Of course “they say it’s cursed.”
The movie, like the book, is a kind of parody of books like “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre.” The Poe-transplants overreact to everything, assured that no matter what happens it’s a sure sign of their downfall, while the flapper uses that peculiarly British tendency to understate everything. “Cold Comfort Form” is also a jackpot for fans of British character actors playing eccentrics, who cheer whenever they see the words “Stephen Fry” in opening titles. Everyone looks familiar from somewhere and a lot of the accents are impenetrable. Don’t be ashamed to turn on the subtitles.
The gloomy and cobwebbed confines of Cold Comfort are ruled by the iron fist of the room-bound Aunt Ada Doom (Sheila Burrell) who “saw something nasty in the woodshed” approximately 69 years ago and won’t let anyone forget that she did. Her daughter Judith (Eileen Atkins) reads doomed tea leaves and gasp-worthy Tarot cards while Judith's husband Amos (Sir Ian McKellan) preaches of hellfire and damnation. (When asked en route to a service “Do you plan what you’re going to say?” he replies “No, but I always knows it will be about burning.”) The two of them are wide-eyed, big-voiced, and shot in various low angles while they bellow about the inevitable doom that will be brought about by their curse or the vengeful hand of God. Their cows are named Pointless, Feckless, Hopeless, and Aimless.
Judith has a little shrine set up to her son (Rufus Sewell), who seems to have walked right off the cover a cheap romance. Lusty, shirtless, washing at the waterpump, winking lasciviously; everything to him is sexual. Watch the mixture of admiration, awe, and camaraderie he feels when he lets the bull out. There are various dirty and ragged servants, and dirty-faced cousin Rennet, whom the others speculate is a third cousin of some kind. They’re not really sure.
Into Cold Comfort walks the recently orphaned Flora Poste, flapper par excellence (Kate Beckinsale). She predicts that the farm’s sons will be named Seth and Rueben because lusty farm sons in books are always named Seth and Rueben (she’s right). Flora is given free room and board because of some unspeakable and long-forgotten wrong Amos did to her father. She is ominously referred to as “Robert Poste’s child” for most of her stay. Since curses are not the thing with her set, she sets to straighten Cold Comfort Farm out, including turning the “child-of-the-woods” granddaughter into a proper flapper; setting Amos loose on the world as a traveling preacher; turning lusty Seth into a movie star; and, of course, getting Aunt Ada out of her room. The response of the farmers is to look upon her, stunned, as if to say “what’s all this then?” To aid her from afar is the elder member of her set (Joanna Lumley), who designs women’s undergarments in London and is the queen of understatement.
Of course everyone is a scenery-chewing caricature, and if you’re a sucker for the BBC, Merchant-Ivory movies, Austen, Bronte, Poe, or “Gosford Park,” you’re in your element. In case you forgot, Kate Beckinsale actually got her start in British art-house flicks like this and Branagh’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and only kills vampires to pay the bills. She holds the movie together as the embodiment of all that’s fashionable and proper for the jet set circa 1925. John Schlesinger (“Midnight Cowboy”) directs briskly with comedy in mind and gives each guttural and nearly incoherent eccentric his or her share of screen time.
What’s somewhat perplexing about both the book by Stella Gibbons and the movie “Cold Comfort Farm” is that everyone is dynamic but the heroine. Beckinsale’s Flora begins the movie convinced of something, sets out to do it, and her success only confirms her beliefs. Isn’t a protagonist supposed to learn something? Didn’t “Emma” learn not to play matchmaker? But Flora’s crusade is a triumph of modernity and conformity: the people at Cold Comfort used to live in the past, doing their own thing, even if they were miserable, until she comes along and brings them into the 20th century and makes them look like everyone else.
Movies like “The Wild Bunch” and “The Last Samurai” show that the transition from an old way of life to modernity benefits most but destroys others; but Flora’s transition is only beneficial. If Flora has a protégé at Cold Comfort then Flora herself is certainly the protégé of her London underwear designer. Perhaps we should notice that both Aunt Ada and Flora are women trying to control the lifestyles of others and that one day Flora will be a stodgy do-nothing like in “Gosford Park.” Perhaps we are simply meant to observe how not every era suffers a terrific upheaval, but we should remember that Flora’s set came crashing to a halt eventually.
Finished July 3, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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