COLD COMFORT FARM
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Gramercy) Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Eileen Atkins, Rufus Sewell, Ian McKellen, Joanna Lumley, Freddie Jones, Ivan Kaye, Sheila Burrell, Stephen Fry. Screenplay: Malcolm Bradbury. Producers: Richard Broke, Antony Root. Director: John Schlesinger. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
COLD COMFORT FARM is directed with such sparkle and confidence that I almost couldn't believe John Schlesinger was behind the camera...at least not the John Schlesinger whose recent contributions to the cinematic canon were suspense misfires like PACIFIC HEIGHTS, THE INNOCENT and EYE FOR AN EYE. Even in his glory days of MIDNIGHT COWBOY, THE DAY OF THE LOCUST and MARATHON MAN, one would hardly say that "light-hearted" was an adjective applicable to his work. Yet here we find Schlesinger tackling the much-beloved Stella Gibbons novel, a parody with a giddy and irreverent tone, and nailing it. COLD COMFORT FARM is thoroughly entertaining and consistently surprising.
Our heroine is Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale), a young woman of the cultured class who finds herself orphaned. With only a modest income left by her parents' estate, Flora begins searching for a relative willing to take her in. She finds one in cousin Judith Starkadder (Eileen Atkins), who seems eager to have "Robert Poste's child" come to Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex to right a wrong done to her father. There Flora finds a singularly odd collection of relations: Judith's husband Amos (Ian McKellen), a fire-and-brimstone preacher; lusty, Hollywood-obsessed cousin Seth (Rufus Sewell); and Aunt Ada Doom (Sheila Burrell), the mysterious and domineering matriarch who once saw "something nasty in the woodshed." To Flora, however, they are simply a challenge, as she sets herself to the task of bringing a bit more life to bleak Cold Comfort Farm.
Stella Gibbons' novel took aim at the over-wrought potboilers which proliferated in the late 20s and early 30s, as well as Gothic tales in the _Wuthering Heights_ mode. A literary satire is a real challenge to film -- it's like trying to pull the humor out of that annual contest to duplicate Hemingway's prose style and put it on screen -- but screenwriter Malcolm Bradbury has come up with the clever premise of following Flora's budding writing career. Grasping at the perfect metaphor for a sunset (she can never quite figure out what "the golden orb" is supposed to do) over her open D. H. Lawrence novels, Flora allows us a bit of insight into the florid writing Gibbons was winking at.
But COLD COMFORT FARM is even more successful at turning the conventions of those genres' plots upside down. Ordinarily, you would expect to find the main point of a story like this to be Flora's nosing into the family secrets until she finds out what wrong was done to her father, and what that "something nasty" was that Aunt Ada saw in the woodshed. Those secrets turn out to be red herrings; it doesn't matter _what_ they are, only that everyone at Cold Comfort Farm is living under the weight of those long-past events, waiting for someone like Flora to come along and push each of them in the direction of the one thing that will make them genuinely excited. The result is some hilarious moments and sharp performances, as we watch Amos improvising a sermon before his Church of (literally) Quivering Brethren, and Seth grabbing his chance at big-screen stardom, and the characters are rendered with a refreshing lack of concern over whether they are being condescended to.
That is a criticism some detractors have leveled against COLD COMFORT FARM, and I think they are missing the point. COLD COMFORT FARM is a parody, and the characters are _supposed_ to be exaggerated the literary types they represent: the maid's daughter is always pregnant, Seth is always shirtless and randy, and Aunt Ada and Judith are always making ominous pronouncements. But Schlesinger and Bradbury show Gibbons' characters with an eye to the basic desire for happiness which Flora is trying to uncover. They're not sneering at rural folk; they're sneering at the literary conventions which turned them into mournful eternal victims. Flora brings a breath of life to Cold Comfort Farm, and Schlesinger's COLD COMFORT FARM brings a breath of life to a decidedly musty film season.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 nasty things in the woodshed: 9.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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