The Hotel New Hampshire (1984)

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Good concept, poorly executed.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The relationship between the cinema and the novels of John Irving has not always been a happy one. It always amazes me how a book as good as "A Prayer for Owen Meany" could be turned into a film as bad as "Simon Birch". With "The Cider-House Rules" Lasse Hallstrom managed to pull off his normal trick of turning everything he touches into pure treacle. The film of "The World According to Garp" left me with the feeling "What the hell was that all about?" .I think that the difficulty is that Irving's books do not always transfer well to the screen. They tend to be long, discursive, dealing with several different themes and with complicated plots and large casts of characters. These factors do not always make a novel unfilmable- there have, for example, been some great films based on the works of Dickens, a writer whom Irving greatly admires. In the case of Irving, however, film directors seem to struggle to find any equivalent to his authorial voice to hold his rather sprawling stories together.The plot of "The Hotel New Hampshire" would be difficult to summarise. It revolves around the Berry family and their five children, John, Franny, Frank, Lilly, and Egg. ("He began as an egg and he still is an egg". I hope you're happy with that explanation because it's the only one you're going to get). In the 1950s, the Berrys run a New Hampshire hotel which, with startling originality, they call the Hotel New Hampshire. Later on, for no good reason, they move to Vienna and run a hotel there which they also name the Hotel New Hampshire. (I say "for no good reason", but the real reason is that Irving himself had lived in Vienna as a student and couldn't resist featuring the city in his book). The film also features a performing bear, a dead dog, a plane crash, a dwarf who is also a successful author, terrorism, rape, incest, homosexuality and suicide. Have you got all that?One or two of the cast are quite good, such as Beau Bridges as Win, the Berry paterfamilias, Rob Lowe as John, the eldest son and the film's narrator, and Wilford Brimley as "Iowa Bob", the crusty old grandfather, but not all are of the same standard. A lot of Jodie Foster's films from the early and mid-eighties tended to suggest that she was fated to spend her adult acting career in the shadow of "Taxi Driver" and her other childhood successes, and this is one of them. As Franny she never really does much to suggest that later in the decade, around the time of "The Accused", she would emerge as one of Hollywood's top young actresses. The opening titles actually refer to "Nastassja Kinski as Susie the Bear"; when I first saw the film I remember thinking "well, that'll make a change from 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'!" In fact, Nastassja does not actually play the performing bear, who is played by a real bear. Her character Susie is a young woman who prefers to dress up as a bear because she does not like being a young woman very much.(Irving describes Susie as physically unattractive, so the ethereally beautiful Nastassja was hardly the most obvious choice to play her). "The Hotel New Hampshire" is not my favourite Irving novel; it is not, for example, in the same class as "Owen Meany". I did, nevertheless, enjoy it a lot more than I did the film. Director Tony Richardson is never able to make us believe in the idiosyncrasies of the various characters or to make us see any connection between the various disparate incidents that make up the plot. It is difficult to know what the film is about. Two characters have an incestuous affair, but it is not a film about incest. Another character is gay, but it is not about homosexuality. Another commits suicide (without any real explanation being given), but it is not about suicide. One is raped, but it is not about rape. Another is injured in a terrorist incident, but it is not about terrorism. Two more die in a plane crash, but it is not about air safety. Susie may dress as a bear, but it is not really about ursine transvestism. One could say of the book that it is about all these things (except perhaps air safety); the most one can say of the film that it mentions all these things but is not actually about any of them. 5/10

Though not as richly realized as THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, this is still a very successful film version of John Irving's novel. Director Tony Richardson weaves a series of oddities together with this comic tragedy. Beau Bridges and family run a hotel in New Hampshire and have myriad experiences. Some are funny, some are tragic and some are just plain outrageous. There's a plane crash, a rape, a dancing bear and a farting dog named Sorrow. Jodie Foster & Rob Lowe play two uncomfortably close siblings. They both give very good performances. Paul McCrane & Seth Green play two other siblings and a very young Jennifer Dundas is perfect as the melancholy Lilly. Wilford Brimley, Wallace Shawn, Matthew Modine and a very funny Anita Morris are in it too. A oddly cast Nastassja Kinski plays Susie the Bear.

I am a big movie fan and I'm certainly not one to ever tell anyone what to watch and to not try to enjoy a movie each his own we all have our own tastes and opinions but I have to say for a film with so much talent involved I hated this film in fact it probably ranks as one of the worse if not the worse film I ve ever seen!!!In fact just like another reviewer wrote I specifically decided to review this film because of how terrible it was and bad taste this film left in my mouth, but again this is just my opinion watch it and make up your own mind This whole film though I realize it was trying to be quirky didn't make any sense at all.

This movie without doubt ranks among the Top 10 most repulsive, stupid, pointless, idiotic, unfunny, uninteresting, excruciatingly boring, obnoxious and downright disgusting pieces of film trash ever made. No doubt, those who have rated this garbage highly find it Real Interesting to watch a young Jodie Foster and a young Rob Lowe acting as brother and sister somehow inexplicably being in love with each other and having sex. These same viewers are also apparently endlessly entertained watching idiots in bear costumes, shallow phony Viennese revolutionaries and a hundred other pointless, disjointed vignettes. However, if you are someone who Has A Life, you'll give up like me after about an hour and just fast-forward through the rest of this crap and hope to find an interesting scene. Hint: you won't. Save yourself and avoid this movie, there's a reason why it wallows in obscurity.