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COLD COMFORT FARM (Green as nature's fecund bounty)
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"Miss Poste, I'm engorgingly in love with you!" shouts neo-Romantic suitor Mr. Myberg (Stephen Fry, A Civil Action) to our heroine Flora as he is hustled out of the twenty-first birthday party soiree for dashing country heir Dick Hawk-Monitor in this bit of cheerful fluff whose wit disguises but does not dull its significant sociological point.
The premise, if pitched to The Player's Griffin Mill, is Flapper Emma meets Thomas Hardy. Our tale opens with bright winsome Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale, Underworld: Evolution) newly orphaned and unbothered ("I didn't know them well," she confesses airily), setting about breezily to become a writer. Lifting a glass of champagne, Prozac for the Jazz Age set, she announces, "Jane Austen and I have so much in common - neither of us can endure a mess," adding, "When I am 53, I hope to write a novel as good as Persuasion -- but in a modern setting, of course." Meantime she struggles to compose turgidly Victorian prose like, "It was winter. The grimmest hour of the darkest day of the year. The golden orb had almost disappeared behind the interlacing fingers of the hawthorn." Breaking from these labors, Flora dashes notes to her far-flung extended family of relatives, off whom she intends cheerfully to sponge. "I want to learn about real life." "What for?" "To put it in books," she chirps.
Her search ends when she encounters her aunt Judith Starkadder (Eileen Atkins, Gosford Park), who first tells her heavily, as though intoning a curse, "There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm. You can stay here, Robert Poste's child, as we atone for the wrong my father done your father." Judith's phobias are fueled by autocratic Aunt Ada Doom (Sheila Burrell), whose cane pounds the floor as she squelches all dissent by repeating, "I saw something nasssty in the woodshed" [when she was five].
Into dank filthy tumbledown Cold Comfort Farm, in darkest Sussex -- "I mean there probably isn't even a bathroom!" exclaims Flora's London big-sister-surrogate Mary Smiling, to which Flora replies, "It is Sussex, for goodness' sake" -- comes Flora, determined to set things right: "Nature's all very well in her place, but there's no reason to be untidy." She applies that shining aluminum technological optimism to the problems of her adopted Starkadder family, including brothers Reuben and Seth (Rufus Sewell, A Knight's Tale) -- "Highly sexed young men living on farms are always called Seth or Reuben," Flora predicts before meeting them -- handyman Amos Lambsreath, gauzy dreamer Elfine, and fire-breathing preacher Amos (Ian McKellen, X-Men) who in the manner of Melville's Moby Dick sermonist delivers a hellfire extemporaneous peroration, full of shaken fists, quivering vocal chords, and quaking parishoners:
Ye miserable, crawlin' worms. Are ye here again then? Have ye come like Nimshi, son of Rehoboam, secretly out of your doomed houses, to hear what's comin' to ye?
Have ye come, old and young, sick and well, matrons and virgins, if there be any virgins amongst you, which is not likely, the world being in the wicked state that it is. Have ye come to hear me tell you of the great, crimson, licking flames of hell fire?
Aye! You've come, dozens of ye. Like rats to the granary, like field mice when it's harvest home. And what good will it do ye? You're all damned! Damned!
Do you ever stop to think what that word means? No, you don't. It means endless, horrifying torment! It means your poor, sinful bodies stretched out on red-hot gridirons, in the nethermost, fiery pit of hell and those demons mocking ye while they waves cooling jellies in front of ye.
You know what it's like when you burn your hand, taking a cake out of the oven, or lighting one of them godless cigarettes? And it stings with a fearful pain, aye? And you run to clap a bit of butter on it to take the pain away, aye? Well, I'll tell ye, there'll be no butter in hell!
One by one, in the manner of a modern secretary-typist ticking through her to-do list, Flora tackles the nineteenth century's outdated neuroses by bringing effortlessly to bear the modern gadgets from cosmopolitan London, for example sending her friend Mary an urgent telegram:
Worst fears confirmed. Seth and Reuben too. Everything's changing. Send magazines!
In short order, Flora dangles a diaphragm ("you wear it inside, like a little bowler hat"), a dish mop, a new frock and bobbed hairdo, soap, a Ford van, and the talkies. One by one, she transforms the Starkadders' gnarled and twisted psyches into happy free people, culminating with the whirlwind open-topped Bentley appearance of American film producer Earl P. Neck, who upon confronting Seth exclaims: "I don't want sissies -- it's red meat time in the movies!"
Upon hearing her baby boy is leaving, Judith wails in a heap, "I'm a dead woman!" upon which Neck asides, "I'd take her too, but she's gloomy."
In the plainest of ways, Cold Comfort Farm believes that seventy years of post-traumatic childhood phobias simply dissolve when faced with benign mockery, issues of Vogue, a chic feathered cap, an open Bentley, and a trip to the South of France. In this it exuberantly celebrates technology and modernity, exuberance in all things, a Brave New World without the didacticism, starting with the cast, all of whom had a thoroughly good time chewing the furniture. Cold Comfort Farm celebrates exuberance of names (Mr. McKnag, Mrs. Beetle, Urk, and the four milk cows Feckless, Graceless, Aimless and Pointless), exuberance of rustic language ("I've been scranletting clear down to Ticklepenny Corner," Reuben proudly says), exuberance of stereotype ("Seth, drain the well," growls Amos, "there's a neighbor missing"), exuberance of wit ("It's bad to be dewy-eyed around smart people, but you can always secretly despise them"), exuberance of romantic self-absorption (Mr. Mybug, as Flora persistently tweaks him, pitches her woo by saying, "I'm a queer moody brute, but there's rich soil in here" -- middle-finger chest-tap - "if you care to dig for it"), and exuberance of deus ex machina: "If you get bored, give me a ring. I'll come rescue you in my plane." "Charles, should an embryo parson have a plane?" "Everyone should have a plane." "Oh, Charles!"
Everyone should have a plane in which to fly away: the credo of a technological century.