Cold Comfort Farm. - movie reviews

National Review, June 17, 1996 by John Simon

A CHARMING 1932 novel, Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, has been adapted for the screen by Malcolm Bradbury, and directed by John Schlesinger into an exquisitely droll, tongue-in-cheek fairy tale. It is beautifully acted and photographed, and it generates, in between laughs, a variety of smiles: benign, ironic, or conspiratorial.

It is the story of Miss Flora Poste, an indomitable English maiden who, having lost her parents, is taken in by relatives, the wildly bizarre Starkadders, whose revolting habitat, Cold Comfort Farm, is the Augean Stables verging on the Lower Depths. It seems that Flora's father had an evil trick played on him by a Starkadder (we never find out what), for which Judith Starkadder, haggard and disheveled, takes in Flora as a permanent non-paying guest. Judith's husband, Amos, is a fire-and-brimstone preacher of no use to the farm, which is -- so to speak -- run by Judith; by her sons, Reuben and Seth, the one tongue-tied and hard-working, the other a handsome womanizer convinced that all girls want to suck his blood; and by various others, family or hired hands. All live in dread of Ada Doom, the despotic matriarch sequestered upstairs, who is haunted by ''something nasty in the woodshed'' she saw as a child (we never learn what). She deigns to come down only once a year to scrutinize and terrorize her for gathered victims.

Disorder, dirt, inefficiency, suppressed passions (some of them involving the upper-class neighbors, the Hawk-Monitors) are everywhere; also unsuppressed ones, involving tumbles in the hay and bastard births. But Flora is not only not fazed, but actually in her element. By almost subliminal insinuations or unexpected shows of force, by solicitous persuasion or peremptory reprimands -- as well as by sheer elbow grease ever so daintily exerted -- she converts the farm into an earthly paradise. Her chief helper is Charles Fairford, her eager yet somewhat tentative high-born suitor, whose car, airplane, and other resources prove useful tools for Flora. The plot is sweetly preposterous, yet irresistibly believable. This, surely, is how the world's problems should be resolved -- by a young lady who is part Britomart, part Boadicea, and part Jane Austen heroine.

The many subplots are beautifully tied together in an ending that brings tears of joy to the eyes. Schlesinger, whose direction has floundered of late, is back in easeful command, and the screenplay does uncustomary justice to its source material. Kate Beckinsale, a fetching young actress, has an imposing brow, a meltingly compelling gaze, and enough poise for a whole troupe of high-wire artistes. She is expertly supported by Eileen Atkins (Judith), Ian McKellen (Amos), Rufus Sewell (Seth), Christopher Bowen (Charles), Sheila Burrell (Ada Doom), as well as Freddie Jones, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, and Miriam Margolyes among many delightful others. Robert Lockhart's beguiling score adds the final enchantment to a warm breeze of a movie.