Cold Comfort Farm

source: 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.

It's a real pity; it's a hilarious book, the cast is excellent, the sets are terrific, and yet, the film just misses the mark. It was as if none of the screen writers understood the book's humor, really, and there were only a few things about the film that I did enjoy: (1) Mrs. Smiling and the way the film showed how she keeps her collection; (2) Seth and Reuben looked like brothers; (3) I adore Sir Ian in anything he does, and he did a lovely job on Amos, different from Alistair Sim, but just as delightful. I think what was really needed for this film to work was a better screenplay based on the book. I honestly don't think that this movie captured the fun of the book in the way that the earlier BBC version did. I actually found it a bit tedious, rather than fun, and they left out some of the best lines, really, for no good reason. I found that it got rather boring toward the end, and didn't really manage to give a sense of Flora Poste's STRUGGLE to change Cold Comfort Farm--it all changed too easily, and so one didn't really have the nice tension "will she succeed?"--she wins over everybody far too easily, and I think a good deal of the story is probably incomprehensible without knowing the book first. So--my verdict is: find that wonderful old BBC version with Alistair Sim and Rosalie Crutchley and Faye Compton--and treat yourself to the book, which is the sort you pull out again to enjoy afresh, years later, and catch this one if it comes on TV, but don't go out of your way for it.

Period, end of statement. There are a few films that are so incredibly well done, so seamless, that they could be watched daily. Well, that *I* could watch daily. This is one! It never lags, it never sags. It is funny, it is real. It is touching, it is hopeful. Kate Beckinsale started her career on such a high note with this early work! The rest of the actors are simply perfect in their roles. Sim-ply perfect!

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.

"Cold Comfort Farm" is one of those movies that, as others have said, grows on you each time you watch it, and after it has done so, you want to pass it around to all your friends. It's great fun to see how Flora Poste's (Kate Beckinsale) arrival at Cold Comfort Farm brightens this dreary, incredibly odd family's life and how she sets about making everybody's life there better. Ian McKellan is excellent (as usual) in his role as the head of the Starkadder household, and the fiery preacher at the local church. If you let it, this movie will be one that you take out and watch over again with great enjoyment, and whose quotable lines become part of your family's lingo for all time.

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I love Masterpiece Theatre and most British farces. Perhaps this particular effort was lacking in some cohesion that might have held my attention. Although the characters were certainly characters and the incongruities certainly incongruous, nothing about this movie satisfied my curiosity. The cast was terrific and their acting was quite good but the storyline seemed unhinged. If a lot of the book was omitted the movie didn't prompt me to even consider reading it. I was left with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a bunch of oddities that somehow were never properly connected. And the denouement (a final part of a story or drama in which everything is made clear and no questions or surprises remain) was completely useless in that regard since it left me with more questions than I had before. What a disappointment this dog of a flick was.

A young woman in 1930s England tries to mooch off her relatives as she gathers material for her future career as a writer. This is meant to be a spoof of the novels of such writers as Dickens and Austen. It is described as a comedy, and the way the actors deliver their lines certainly suggests that the dialog is dripping with wit. The only problem is that there is nary a single chuckle to be had from the humorless script. With hardly a plot to hold one's interest, it soon turns into a dreary bore. It is based on a popular comic novel from the 1930s; hence the humor is either dated or the screenplay does not do justice to the novel. It's a shame because it has a good cast that seems to be really trying.

"Child, child. If you come to this doomed 'ouse, what is there to save you?"- Judith Starkadder in COLD COMFORT FARM. The "child" in question is the lone offspring of one Robert Poste (deceased) and, as we are soon to discover, Poste's progeny, Flora, is hardly one in need of saving. Orphaned in her budding womanhood, nettled by the golden orb of an unrealized literary career, Flora strikes out from the discerning (or snobbish) urban sophistication of London ( leaving behind her good friend Mary and Mary's invaluable manservant, Sneller) and heads for the bucolic splendor of the Sussex countryside to lodge with her relatives, the Starkadders, and find herself. Robert Poste's child finds instead: a muck-begrimed tumbledown estate wherein resides a ready-for-Hollywood womanizer (Cousin Seth), an estate-coveting farmer (Cousin Reuben), a daffy romantic (Cousin Elfine), a too-loving mother (Cousin Judith), a 'vengeful god', proselytizing father (Cousin Amos), and an iron-willed matriarch (Greataunt Ada Doom). There's also a smattering of Lambsbreath (Adam) and a smidgen of Hawk-Monitor (Dick). Inside the Starkadder fold Flora encounters a resistance to dish washing modernity (the twig versus the hand mop); the rumor of an unmentionable misdeed once perpetrated against her father; the oft-cited permanence of the Starkadders on their environs; and the matriarch's frequently mentioned trauma after having witnessed a particularly odious occurrence inside the outdoor log pile storage facility ("...something nasty in the woodshed"). Undaunted, Flora presents a cool brow and an almost impervious demeanor plus an extremely persuasive power to influence. Within COLD COMFORT FARM, where high fashion and applied scientific reasoning smash headlong into arrested sociological development and stunted personal/ familial growth, tear-inducing laughter is the order of the day. As mentioned in the comments of others, Ms. Beckinsale, clad in her natty period togs and radiating a winsome, unflappable aura (while also projecting a strangely prepubescent vibe), hasn't had as good a role since Flora. Meanwhile, those master thespians, Freddie Jones, Ian McKellan, and the inimitable Eileen Atkins nearly go mad with delight as they burrow gleefully into their characters. Rufus Sewell's Seth smolders hilariously while Stephen Fry's Mybug, "soaked in nature's fecund blessing", blusters uproariously. This sort of comedy of manners and cultural collision required an intelligent, perceptive and witty director. John Schlesinger (DARLING, 1965) fit the bill gloriously.

I don't get all of the great comments about this movie, but then I'm not a fan of spoofs of any kind. I think I'm in a minority, however. I just find them so predictable with such a lack of inspiration. Cold Comfort Farm is no exception. Not only did I not find it funny, I nearly turned it off halfway through from sheer excruciating boredom. It was awful. Trite, hackneyed, awful.