Cold Comfort Farm (1995)

Wonderful Movie

The Worst Film Ever

Best movie of this year hands down!

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale) is a superficial young woman recently orphaned with no work skills. She tells her friend Mrs. Mary Smiling (Joanna Lumley) that she wants to be a writer but only when she's 53 after some living. She is counting on living off of her relatives but only a few of her country relatives offer. Distant cousin Judith Starkadder (Eileen Atkins) offers the rundown Cold Comfort Farm. She is married to Amos (Ian McKellen) and has a womanizing son in Seth (Rufus Sewell). Flora insists on bettering the unhappy farm.This is a comedy but just not really my kind of comedy. It's based on a British comic novel from the '30s. It skewers the romantization of the English country farm life from British literature. It's a dated comedy from another era and it's British. It has its charms but I can't find any big laughs.

This is an updated version with an all star cast. Dame Eileen Atkins is perfectly funny as the cousin who invites Flora Poste to visit the farm. Cold comfort farm is the actually name of the Starkadder family who lived for generations. Matriarch Ada Boom is wonderfully played by Sheila Burrell. The entire cast is first rate even Kate Beckinsale is brilliant too. If the film has flaws, its that there too many first rate actors in the cast and not enough time for all of them. There are so many memorable characters and too little time for most of them. Atkins is brilliant as always. McKellen is also fine here. Margolyes is not on enough. But most of all, we don't get to find out what Ada Boom saw in the wood shed.

If ever a movie with a generally realistic setting called for suspension of disbelief, Cold Comfort Farm is it. The viewer is asked to believe that a well brought up but penniless orphan (Kate Beckinsale) comes to live with relatives who mostly despise her and hate one another and who want desperately to leave this wretched, filthy, gloomy farm but cannot do so because of a tyrannical recluse of a family matriarch who is holed up in her room, consuming enormous quantities of food -- and in the course of an hour and a half, the plucky young orphan has transformed the lives of everyone on the farm, including the matriarch and the gloomy, mad cousin who invited her to come live with them because of a unexplained but terrible wrong done to the young woman's father by this family. Kate Beckinsale is outstanding in the role of the orphaned young woman and Ian McKellen effortlessly steals the picture from everyone but Beckinsale in his role as a fire-and-brimstone preacher whom Kate's character persuades to leave the farm to his eldest son and pursue his mission of preaching his terrifying gospel to the world. The picture has its moments, mostly because of Beckinsale and McKellen, though there is also a wonderful bit involving a Hollywood producer friend of the young orphan's who is persuaded to visit the farm and make a movie star of the lecherous younger brother. Mostly, however,Cold Comfort Farm is thin gruel and not nearly as amusing as the people who made it seem to think it is.

"Cold Comfort Farm" has a familiar plot, but is very well done. Portraying young Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale) moving in with her backwards relatives in 1930s England and trying to change everything, the movie has the perfect pacing. It's the sort of situation where her relatives sort of irk you, but you can't help but admire them (mainly due to Flora's snobbish attitude about everything). It just goes to show what a great director John Schlesinger ("Midnight Cowboy", "The Day of the Locust", "Pacific Heights") was. He will definitely be missed. Also starring Eileen Atkins, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Ian McKellen, Miriam Margoyles and Rufus Sewell.