ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, August 10, 1996 TAG: 9608120123
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: MOVIE REVIEW
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
A certain person of a certain social class might well take one, good look at Flora Post, the heroine of "Cold Comfort Farm," and be inspired to remark out loud that although she is obviously a woman of good intentions, she does not know her place.
To which Miss Post would politely reply, "Bosh."
She knows her place just fine, thank you, and it is to tidy up that which is messy, to make things right - and if that requires a bit of meddling with social conventions, then that it is precisely what she must do.
It is this quality of hers that is the dynamic force behind the many changes that take place all around her in this delightful English comedy, based on a novel by Stella Gibbons. As funny as this movie is, it is no superficial froth, but gets right down in the muck of class consciousness.
The reality for Flora Post (Kate Beckinsale) is that although she is from a good family and travels in all the right social circles in 1920s London, she gets only 100 pounds a year - hardly enough to keep her in stockings, as her good friend Mary Smiling (Joanna Lumley) notes.
So, after the death of her parents, Flora writes off to even her most distant relatives in hopes of finding a place to live for a while. It's just fine with her because she needs to observe the lives of "ordinary people" so that she can write a novel "as good as `Persuasion'."
Judging by the replies she receives, there are apparently no ordinary people, at least not in her family. But there are the Starkadders, whose dark, mud-smeared Sussex farm immediately challenges Flora's sense of order and cleanliness. Beneath the mud and gloom is a problem of a far darker nature: It is Grandmama, Ada Doom (Sheila Burrell), whose assertion that she "saw something nasty in the woodshed" as a young child has been absorbed into the family - even the farm - like a poison.
It infects handsome Seth (Rufus Sewell), who is driven to womanize by a fear of female power. It drives his mother Judith (Eileen Atkins) to the tarot cards and murmurings of her inevitable demise. It inspires Judith's husband to preach never of God's love, but of the fires of eternal damnation in his Church of the Quivering Brethren - its motto, "The Earth Will Burn, But We Will Quiver."
Flora will have none of it and chips away at the mud-caked veneer of the crazy Starkadder household with absolute confidence and self-possession. She challenges Grandmama's crazed mutterings with typical aplomb. "How do you know it was in the woodshed?" she asks.
And that is only part of her master plan to bring Cold Comfort Farm back to life, which she does with the tender attention of a gifted gardener.
Directed with total command by John Schlesinger (most famous for "Midnight Cowboy"), "Cold Comfort Farm" is as close to a perfect comedy as anyone has made in a long time - partly because of its remarkably gifted cast, partly owing to a wonderful script by Malcolm Bradbury.
Unquestionably, you'd have to be English to appreciate the ribbing class consciousness takes from this movie. But Americans certainly don't mind watching snobbery take a sock in the jaw - particularly, when it makes us laugh out loud.
Cold Comfort Farm
****
Rated PG for some adult situations; a Gramercy Pictures release showing at the Grandin Theatre, 100 minutes.
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Amos Starkadder, played by Ian McKellen, preaches fromby CNBthe pulpit of the Church of the Quivering Brethren in "Cold
Comfort."