Cinema: Derek Malcolm
CHRIS MONGER, the writer-director of The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, once made an existential thriller called Voice-Over, which was shown at the Edinburgh Festival and was radical enough to suggest that the last thing he would do would be to escape Wales for Los Angeles to make films. But that’s eventually where his career took him, where he made the interesting Waiting for the Light with Shirley MacLaine and Teri Garr.
The present movie is as far from Voice-Over as it is possible to get, though it could do wonders for the Welsh Tourist Board. It relies more on charm than spikiness — like a watered-down version of Dylan Thomas in his slightly saucy village-tale mode.
The Englishman of the title is, of course, Hugh Grant, who appears, with the excellent Ian McNeice, as one of two cartographers engaged in measuring the local landmark of the village of Ffynnon Garw. This is important to the locals since if the hump is 1 000 feet it qualifies as the first Welsh mountain, and if it’s less it’s merely a hill.
The time is 1917 when most of the able-bodied are away at the war and those left behind are engaged in the war effort. But Ffynnon Garw becomes everyone’s obsession – – the trick is to build it up to the required height while preventing the Englishmen from leaving for home.
The film could have done with a slightly darker tone — this was, after all, a miserable time for any Welsh mining community. But Monger goes all out for the kind of eccentric comedy Americans often say the British can do better than they can and loses the opportunity to hint at something deeper.
The writing of Ian Har’s part as Johnny Shellshocked, a young war veteran who is finally persuaded out of a catatonic state by the mountain-making, is a case in point. There’s very little there to twist the guts a bit.
The result is a pleasing but lightweight film, saved by Vernon Layton’s cinematography, which makes it look a treat, and by a cast that manages to play Welsh (and English) stereotypes so that they appear just this side of parody.
Grant, who is decidedly more than a pretty face when it comes to timing a line (provided the line is worth timing), and McNeice do everything asked of them. And so, more surprisingly, does Tara Fitzgerald as the pretty maid brought from Cardiff by publican Morgan the Goat (Colm Meaney) to dally with the former.
Nobody plays badly, and Kenneth Griffith as the Reverend Jones gives the kind of expert cameo that might well land him in the lap of Hollywood as one of those cherished Brit character actors they are always going on about.
The trouble is that the joke, which is explained away in the title, begins to pall two-thirds of the way through and starts to need the stronger direction Monger might have given it were he not so determined to make a film that induces chuckles rather than thought. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a Welsh comedy, but one with a little more iron in its soul, like Dylan Thomas, would have served us better.
But, as it is, the film is warm, friendly and good fun — which will be quite enough for most people.