Film: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Amr Waked
Directed By: Lasse Hallstrom
Written By: Simon Beaufoy
Based On: the novel by Paul Torday
Produced By: Paul Webster
Distributor: Lionsgate
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 107 minutes
Website: http://www.fishingintheyemen.com/
Budget: N/A
Genre: Romance, Drama, Comedy
Release Date: March 30, 2012
When you hear Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a romantic comedy, and not a shockingly specific wilderness TV show, you might expect what’s in store is a little different than the interchangeable romantic comedies that seem to dribble onto screens faster than Katherine Heigl and the Hallmark Channel can produce them. Under the direction of Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules), Salmon Fishing in the Yemen goes to great lengths to distinguish itself from the morass of its genre with some visual panache and a less generic set-up that somehow winds up hitting all the usual notes anyway.
Aiming for the sort of genteel, freakishly polite courtship that only seems to exist in British romances, Salmon Fishing stars Ewan McGregor as Dr. Alfred Jones, a buttoned-up, curmudgeonly expert on fishing and fisheries called in by Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (The Devil Wears Prada’s Emily Blunt), a consultant hired by the ridiculously wealthy Sheik Muhammed (Amr Waked) to bring the sport to his home country. Seeing the idea as against the laws of both sense and nature—environment and money are a factor, to see nothing of how to get 10,000 live salmon to the Middle Eastern nation—Alfred dismisses the idea in a huff misguided indignation, much to Harriet’s amusement.
Because there needs to be a movie, the project gains the attention of the Prime Minister’s press secretary, a type-A wheeler-dealer named Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas) who sees the quirky, nigh-impossible project as the perfect opportunity to counter bad press from recent events in the Middle East. Practically forced to work together, Alfred laments his situation with his absent, career-driven wife, while Harriet finds her burgeoning relationship with a soldier (Tom Mison) cut short when he is deployed to Afghanistan under secretive circumstances. Nursing their own pains, the two are drawn to each other and to the boundless optimism and faintly mystical vision of the Sheik, who throws money at the problem and starts to convince Alfred and Harriet (and an elated Patricia) that an impossible dream might just be within reach.
There’s a lot of promise in Salmon Fishing’s unconventional set-up, especially with McGregor and Blunt, two actors with charisma to spare (“He’s so cute!” cooed a woman multiple times at the screening I attended, as McGregor uttered another charmingly uptight witticism that would get a less handsome man smacked). Even in a more traditional romantic comedy, the pairing could probably carry the movie themselves, but Hallstrom, with screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire) stack the deck with bouncy dialogue and lots of quirky camera angles. The movie overreaches in a few aspects, most notably in the local Yemenis’ disdain for the Sheik’s project, which strangely, briefly pulls the movie into action movie territory that gives McGregor a hero moment so ridiculous James Bond might have thought it implausible. Not only is the extremist subplot surplus to the requirements of the film, it factors heavily into the movie’s final act, a choice that only highlights how out of place and absurd it is.
Beaufoy pushes the script’s winking refusal to stay within its own genre a bit too far, taking easy jabs at an English government populated by opportunistic buffoons and playing the Sheikh more as sidekick and mystic guru to Alfred, rather than the force that drives the plot. Hallstrom and Beaufoy should be applauded for stretching the boundaries of the apparent low audience standards of romantic comedies, but all the idiosyncratic touches in the world can’t deter the plot from its pre-determined course. As Alfred slowly lets down his uptight façade and Harriet copes with her boyfriend’s disappearance, the Laws of Romantic Comedies demand they fall for each other—if you think that spoils anything, I advise you to watch more movies—and that unavoidable fact keeps the movie in familiar territory. Once the novelty wears off, it’s still about two pretty people gazing meaningfully into a panoramic sunset—this one just happens to be in Yemen (or Morocco, standing in here for the title country).
That kind of cynicism, though, has little place in the unique reality carved out by movies like this one. The idealized world occupied by Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and a thousand other kindred movies isn’t meant for the casual eviscerations scrutiny like this always entails. Hallstrom’s sure hand ensures McGregor and Blunt remain a winning couple throughout, and it’s hard not to root for them to stop referring to each other as “Dr. Jones” (his professional name) and “Miz Chetwode-Talbot” and get on with the lovey-dovey already. It’s rare to find a movie of this type that overreaches, rather than struggles for adequacy, so many of the movie’s flaws are lost in McGregor’s smile, Blunt’s cheekbones, or majestic shots of rivers teeming with fish. There’s probably some sort of parallel that can be drawn between the film and the idea of fish struggling their way against the current, but I’m certainly not going to make it.
Rating: 2.5 Stars
