Directed by Lasse Hallström. Starring Emily Blunt, Ewan McGregor, Kristin Scott Thomas, Amr Waked, Tom Mison 12A cert, general release, 107 min
Lasse Halström's latest is insufferably bland, writes DONALD CLARKE
IS THERE ANY genre more wearying than the plodding, fat- brained adaptation of last year’s book club favourite? Oh, well. If we must have such things, then the acknowledged master of the degraded form may as well be allowed to work his malign anti-magic upon them.
Having made Pablum-like gruel of The Shipping News, The Cider House Rules and Chocolat, Lasse Hallström returns to transform Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen into a film so bland it could safely be served to recovering stomach-ulcer patients.
No, that’s not fair. The Shipping News was bland. Chocolat was bland. Hallström has achieved something more memorable with his latest impression of a movie. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is so impressively terrible, one is almost persuaded that Lasse – who, eons ago, directed the gorgeous My Life as a Dog – has rediscovered a directorial voice. It’s a grating voice. It nags in your ear like a sick child. But it’s a voice all right.
Fans of Torday’s slippery, satirical novel will be aware that, rather than working metaphorically, its title offers a literal description of the action.
Ewan McGregor – who, despite appearing in The Phantom Menace, has never been worse – plays a fishing expert with the British Civil Service. Exhibiting the generous approach to autistic people more usually essayed by playground bullies, Hallström reveals Dr Alfred Jones’s Asperger syndrome by having him dress and behave like Walter the Softy from the Beano. He buttons up his Viyella shirt. He laces his shoes furiously. He refers to the love interest (Emily Blunt) as “Miss Chetwode- Talbot” right up to the last reel. Come back, Ricky Gervais. All is forgiven.
The tolerable Ms Blunt plays a PR consultant (boo!), client to a Yemeni sheikh, who has been asked to see if it is possible to introduce the titular game fish to middle-eastern rivers. Not surprisingly, Dr Jones immediately ridicules the notion, but the prime minister’s icy press secretary (the ubiquitous Kristin Scott Thomas) is keen. She sees the plan as a way of cementing relations with the Arab nation while simultaneously distracting attention from troubling foreign wars.
Dr Jones is ordered to carry out a feasibility study and, while poking around the surprisingly verdant Yemeni uplands, he slips hopelessly into love with the large-lipped marketing wonk. Their path to happiness is, however, littered with clunky narrative obstacles. Alfred remains tensely married to Penelope Keith’s character in To the Manor Born (not really, but you get the idea). Miss Chetwode-Talbot is attached to a soldier who has gone missing in Afghanistan.
Hallström manages the impressive dual feat of betraying Torday’s more astringent novel and bastardising a popular contemporary work that has no direct connection to the current enterprise: while watching Scott Thomas – a parody of her own stock harridan – it is nearly impossible not to think of the TV series The Thick of It.
But Hallström’s cosy, half- formed take on New Labour focus- group speak reveals an artistic sensibility far too pallid, weak- kneed (and, to be fair, generous) to embark on anything so impolite as political satire. It’s like watching Brenda Blethyn having a go at cage fighting.
All sly asides, cutting commentaries and bitter ironies are sacrificed to promote a romantic plot that doesn’t even work on its own pathetically compromised terms. Hallström’s notion of dramatic subtext involves shooting scurrying commuters in a fashion that suggests salmon swarming upstream. The sheikh’s scheme genuinely does seem like an inappropriate, vulgar exercise in plutocracy, but the enterprise is made to seem as charmingly Quixotic as Kevin Costner’s big idea in Field of Dreams.
For all that, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen has already received many glowing reviews in the US. It seems there’s a market for this sort of empty guff. What has become of us?
