A Merry War

It's fitting, perhaps, that a film about mediocrity be mediocre itself. Based on George Orwell's 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a down-and-out, bromidic romantic comedy with class conflict and the meaning of art at stake, this adaptation by Robert Bierman is rooted in the obvious and the sophomoric, with neither shades of irony nor glints of passion. Gordon Comstock (Richard E. Grant, no Withnail here) is a big hit in his art deco PR office as he produces such gems of copy as "New hope for the ruptured," but his true calling is poetry. When his chapbook Mice gets a mildly glowing review (written by his jaded, upper-class publisher), he quits his job, moves into a forbidding rooming house with an aspidistra plant, and becomes a Poet. His staid girlfriend Rosemary (Helena Bonham Carter, playing a drudge) looks on helplessly as he sinks deeper into squalor, idealizing the lower classes, believing they will bring him closer to his muse. Bierman doesn't seem sure whether his film should attack middle-class complacency or vindicate it. Instead, like Comstock, A Merry War flails at the poor plant of the title, a symbol here not of conformity but of a failure of the imagination. At the Avon and Jane Pickens theaters.

-- Peter Keough