Financial Times (London,England)
August 3, 1995, Thursday
Welsh have a whale of a time – Cinema
By STEPHEN AMIDON
THE ENGLISHMAN WHO WENT UP A HILL, BUT CAME DOWN A MOUNTAIN (PG) Christopher Monger FREE WILLY 2 (U) Dwight Little
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill, But Came Down a Mountain is the sort of movie they were not supposed to be able to make any more. Quirky, charming, modest in intent yet generous in its rewards, the film stands in almost direct opposition to the noisy, gloomy, sub-human fare which Hollywood and its British clones have by-and-large churned out this summer. Only the presence of the nascent superstar Hugh Grant threatens to turn this into the sort of effort a studio executive could love.
In the film, Grant plays a recovering young first world war officer who, in 1917, is dispatched along with a pompous superior (Ian McNeice) to perform a topographical survey of Wales. Their task is gloriously bureaucratic – to determine which of the country’s land masses are mountains and which are merely hills. Their first stop is the village of Ffynnon Garw, where, much to the dismay of the local inhabitants, they discover that the local heap is in fact 17 feet short of the 1,000 ft it would need to be officially designated a mountain.
To the proud Welsh, this simply will not do. In an area beset by grinding poverty and cultural insecurity, civic pride has long been founded on the fact that they live in the shadow of the First Mountain in Wales. To have this designation taken away, particularly by two Englishmen, is an unbearable slap in the face. So, led by an irascible local minister (Kenneth Griffith) and a randy publican (Colm Meany), the townsfolk conspire to keep the two officers in town long enough to secretly, bucket by bucket, add 20 feet to the hill, and then demand a remeasurement.
The ensuing action makes for a great deal of rich, low-key comedy. Though working from a true story passed along by his grandfather, writer/director Christopher Monger wisely refuses to take matters too seriously. For the most part, he keeps the film free of sentimentality and message-making. Perhaps somewhere in his early conception Monger saw the story as having great metaphorical value about Welsh national identity, though the final product never strays very far from being a delightfully specific tale about a village of idiosyncratic people desperately holding on to the small share of self-worth the world has allocated them.
Meany and Griffith shine as warring personalities who come together in the face of foreign intervention, while McNeice is perfect as the overblown British officer. The usually fine Tara Fitzgerald, however, is badly miscast as a maid who wins Grant’s heart and convinces him to take the village’s side. As for Grant himself, he is everything we have come to expect, which is to say he is boyish charm personified. His obvious talent notwithstanding, Grant’s growing popularity seems to be founded on his ability to turn in just the sort of performance he registers here – unthreatening, blushingly seductive and eminently watchable. It is these qualities, and not any public relations campaign, that will soon consign his recent extra-curricular misfortunes to oblivion.
You have to pity the poor halibut. Few people complain when he is factory farmed from the sea and turned into chip shop fodder. Hardly anyone bemoans his death in oil spills or cries out when sharp hooks are driven through his gills. And nobody, but nobody, would ever dream of making a film about him.
Whales, on the other hand, have a much easier ride. A Japanese fisherman need only look askance at one to incur the wrath of righteous youth everywhere. And just try ordering one with mushy peas. Most tellingly, however, is the fact that they not only have films made about them – they get sequels.
Free Willy 2 is the follow-up to the hugely successful 1993 film in which a lonely motherless boy (Jason James Richter) and a lonely motherless orca made friends and outwitted the callow adults who wanted to rein Willy in. After that movie unexpectedly grossed Dollars 153m, a reunion was all but inevitable. This time around, both are saddled with pesky little brothers, though otherwise the song remains pretty much the same – evil multinational oil spillers combine with mercenary aquarium goons to rope in the proud mammal, only to be foiled when boy and fish join forces.
In all fairness, director Dwight Little has fashioned a good-looking film that has a lively finale in which Richter and his mates are trapped by burning oil. (No points for guessing who saves them.) What sinks the film is its unrelieved sentimentality and the preposterously humanoid antics of the whales, who will no doubt be wearing baseball caps and listening to boom boxes in the next instalment.
The re-issue of a handsome new print of Howard Hawks’ grandfather of all noirs, The Big Sleep, is a welcome spell of grown-up cinema in a generally juvenile summer of films. After decades of consignment to the television screen, it greatly benefits from a more expansive projection. What is perhaps most striking about the film a half century after its release is how incredibly sexy it is – I’ll take Bogey and Bacall using talk about race horses as a code for bedroom technique over Stallone’s pectorals or Stone’s scissored legs any day. And Bogart’s book-shop pick-up of Dorothy Malone remains a masterpiece of seductive misdirection.
Equally rewarding are those early scenes in which Charles Waldron’s deeply decadent Colonel Sternwood indulges in Marlowe’s vices by proxy, waxing lyrical about the orchid’s ‘rotten sweetness of corruption’ in some of the few lines by William Faulkner that producer Jack Warner did not consign to the dust bin. And don’t worry if you cannot always follow matters too closely – neither Hawks nor author Raymond Chandler could ever satisfactorily account for what is going on. Just sit back and enjoy.
