The Englishman Yadda Yadda

reviewed by Dave

Hugh Grant and Colm Meaney together on one screen? Is there a theater that can hold these two great titans of cinema? Apparently not, given the dismal showing this movie had back when it was first released.

Still, box office returns have very little to do with how good a movie is, so we picked up The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, and all I can say is, “America, you got this one right.”

The film tells the tale of two cartographers who visit a village in Wales to survey the local mountain. The cartographers, one of whom is played by Grant, measure the mountain and it is determined to be only “hill” size by English standards. Seems the hill is about 16 feet short of being classified a mountain.

The villagers are incredibly not happy about this. Apparently there is no greater insult to a Welshman than to call their mountain a hill. So the villagers decide to add another 20 feet to the mountain. While that major undertaking is going on, they’ve also got to keep the cartographers in town long enough to re-measure the mountain when the villagers are done adding to it.

The Englishman seems to have a lot in common with one of my favorite movies, Waking Ned Devine. Both films are set in small towns, they both involve the town banding together to outfox someone, and they both have casts that are largely unknown actors in America. So why is one highly enjoyable, and the other dull as the very dirt the villagers are using to artificially inflate the size of their hill?

Part of it might be due to the constraints of telling what might be a true story – the ending seems to indicate this all really happened, but I’m not sure if it did. If the movie isn’t a true story, then the script was bad for no apparent reason. For now I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and say that adherence to at least some semblance of fact prevents The Englishman from fully becoming what it needed to be – a gentle, intelligent farce. Instead, the comedy is kept minimal, and you’re left with a light drama about people putting dirt on a hill because they’re too inbred to care about anything that actually matters.

Well, maybe they aren’t inbred, but I found it difficult to empathize with the villagers and their obsession over the hill. If this is all these people have to worry about during World War I, they’re living a charmed life.

You, too, can lead a charmed life. Simply spare yourself from an evening spent watching this flick.