Movie Review: "Salmon Fishing In The Yemen"

"Salmon Fishing In The Yemen": B.  There is nothing quite like watching a movie about the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula to get your mind off the eighty-eight degree temperature inside your un-airconditioned house. So Momma Cuandito and I drove over to the Hopkins Theater to catch (no pun intended) "Salmon Fishing In The Yemen," a movie that's been around town for what seems like forever. At $2.50 per senior rate ticket, it's a great deal.

The story begins with short introductory scenes so we can meet the main players. Cute, long-legged Harriet (Emily Blount) works for a London financial outfit whose client, billionaire Sheik Muhammed, wants to bring salmon fishing to Yemen, a sparsely populated hot box on the Gulf of Aden with nary a droplet of inland water in sight. To the sheik, money is no object. Harriet meets handsome hunk Robert on a blind date, and before you can say "one night stand" they get horizontal, if you know what I mean. Dr. Alfred "Fred" Jones (Ewan McGregor, who looks like a young Bob Costas) is a fish and aquatics expert with the British government fisheries department that Harriet's company desires to use in order to pull off the sheik's seemingly impossible request. Fred is married to a cold fish (again, no pun intended), but he is a rather simple man with simple tastes, and actually does not seem like all that bad a fit for his wife. The always excellent Kristin Scott Thomas plays Patricia Maxwell, who is the crackerjack press secretary for the British Prime Minister. Her job is always to put her boss in a good light, so she needs to be a spin doctor when things go wrong. Indeed, things do go wrong when very bad news about the British army suffering heavy casualties in Afghanistan hits the airways. Maxwell informs her staff that they need a feel-good story about British relationships with the middle east to offset the bad news, and somehow they get ahold of the e-mail correspondence between Harriet and Fred regarding the salmon project.

The best part of the movie occurs shortly after those introductory sequences when Fred first meets Harriet. He is forced by his boss, who is being pressured by Maxwell, to humor Harriet's firm or at least to go through the motions of pretending to be interested. Against his will Fred goes to Harriet's office, but wastes no time launching into a humorous tirade about why the sheik's request is not only ludicrous, but physically and scientifically impossible. Harriet is up to the task of defending the merits of the project. The repartee between Fred and Harriet is very entertaining. As you might guess, the project does not terminate when Fred leaves Harriet's office. After all, this is a full length motion picture.

There are a lot of side stories going on to keep things moving for the viewer. The sheik and Fred hit it off, finding a common bond in their love of fly fishing. Harriet and Fred's admiration for the sheik form the impetus toward working together on the project, and their professional relationship is complicated with concerns about their own respective significant others. Harriet and Fred are together alone, several thousand miles away from home. Scott Thomas, as Maxwell, provides a fair amount of humor, always with an eye toward improving the public's opinion of the Prime Minister. I have seen her in several movies, and this is my favorite role for her. She is a top drawer actress, and here she is on top of her game.

As is true with many romantic comedies (if, indeed, that is the right genre label for this film), the first half is much better than the second. Things kind of fall apart about three-quarters of the way through the film. The most egregious examples include a couple of scenes involving Robert. There is a calamity occurring which I can't imagine ever happening, even if I could imaging fishing in the desert. Also, I was quite disappointed with the cop-out ending. This movie could have been much more, but settles for being pleasingly satisfactory. For an entrance fee of just $2.50, maybe that is all one should expect.