A MERRY WAR (aka Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. First Look Pictures Director: Robert Bierman Writer: Alan Plater, novel by George Orwell Cast: Richard E. Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Jim Carter, Harriet Walter, Lill Roughly, Julian Wadham, Lesley Vickerage, John Clegg, Barbara Leigh Hunt
The best chapter in a particular college textbook I was assigned on the uses of the English language deals with how the different social classes use words. The upper and lower classes are surprisingly alike. Referring to a container for flowers, uppers and lowers say "vayze" while the middle classes use the more pretentious pronunciation "vahz." Uppers and lowers say "couch" while the middles say "sofa." These differences extend to possessions (within limits of course) with the very rich and the rather poor driving plain, older cars while those in the middle manuever late-model, fashionable vehicles. Why is this? I suppose the reason is that the really wealthy are well established: everyone knows who they are. They do not have to prove anything, to be ostentatious. As for the lower orders, as the principal character in "A Merry War" reports, "They have nothing to lose so they can always tell the truth."
Which brings us to the movie. "A Merry War," based on an early (1936) novel by George Orwell called "Keep the Aspidistra Flying," is somewhat autobiographical, based on the young Orwell's wrestling with his own political and philosophical beliefs. "A Merry War" is actually about two raging conflicts: one is between a young man and his woman friend; the other is between the young man and...the young man--an internal conflict. George Orwell at the time could not quite make up his mind whether he was a radical or a conservative, so he converted his interior struggle to art. In the novel Orwell has the man debating with himself. In the movie, directed by Robert Bierman from Alan Plater's adaptation of the novel, the interior struggle becomes an ongoing debate between the man and a woman.
The film is an absolute delight, as the middle classes would say (or would it be the uppers)? Though it takes place in the London of 1934, it is technically exceptional, splashing all the color and ambiance of the great city photographed on some unusually sunny, rain-free days. Though its very subject is political and philosophical, there is no mention of the rising threat of Nazism just across the channel in Germany, nor is there much sign that the Great Depression is having all that much impact in England.
The story centers on Gordon Comstock (Richard E. Grant), a highly successful advertising copywriter whose boss, Erskine (Jim Carter), tells him that his copy for a cereal product has caused sales to rise 17%. The graphics are provided by Comstock's woman friend, Rosemary (Helena Bonham Carter), who works with him in the same office and whose art work gets along with the verbiage far better than she with he. One day Comstock decides that he has had enough of this life as a sellout writing doggeral for banal commodities and, determined to be a full-time poet and a "free man," he quits his job, takes a thoroughly respectable flat near his new job in a bookstore, and stares daily at the uptight landlady's apidistra plant--which symbolizes middle- class respectability, neatness, order, and conformity. Though his poetry is turned down by almost every publisher, he gets a sudden windfall from a magazine in "our colony in California" of $50 which he blows in one night of drunken partying with Rosemary and a wealthy publisher friend, Ravelston (Julian Wadham). After a drunken scandal which lands him in jail for a night, he is left pence-less, takes a filthy flat in the sordid Lambeth district together with a job in a scuzzy bookstore, and declares that he is happy living with friendly, but sometimes violent people who are the antithesis of bourgeois respectability.
Much of the film deals with an ongoing debate between Comstock and Rosemary, a controversy that often scales witty slopes that would make Oscar Wilde proud. While Rosemary, like most English women, would like to live a respectable, middle-class life with a steadily employed man and kids, she is constantly put off by what she considers her boy friend's oafish insistence on being free, disreputable, noncomforming and messy. Their arguments are pursued in Comstock's bug-infested digs, in the neat and clean office of the advertising agency, in the publisher's pied-a-terre which finds Comstock's friend frequently in the company of his mistress Hermoine (Lesley Vickerage), and in a posh restaurant where Comstock and Rosemary are amusingly patronized by a haughty waiter.
"A Merry War" is the antithesis of all-American blockbusters like "Armageddon" and proves, as many a witty, cultivated film can, that less is more. You need not go to London's fringe theaters or to New York's off-Broadway stage companies to find such a regard for words as you'll get with "A Merry War." Here you're not dealing with high-priced publicists that try to see you a movie that will knock your socks off or scare you out of your wits. Films of this nature are not products which are doled out by commercial outfits who are in the game only for the buck and who have contempt for their audience which, they believe, cannot separate the wheat from the chaff. Apropos, during the "slum" phase of Comstock's life, he praises one type of commercial transaction where neither the seller nor the buyer is getting ripped off, where each side knows exactly what it's getting. He relates the tale of the guy who collects horse manure and sells it to people who use the stuff to make their gardens grow. "They're buying and selling shit," as he describes this honest transaction. "Nobody has any illusions." Utilizing excellent performers like Richard E. Grant in the role of Gordon Comstock, Helena Bonham Carter as Rosemary, and Harriet Walter as Gordon's put-upon sister Julia, director Robert Bierman has done George Orwell proud by projecting outward the novelist's inner conflict about class and caste, fashioning an intriguing, quick, touching and sometimes venomous movie.
Not Rated. Running time: 101 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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