A lightweight outing from 1985 featuring Hugh Grant, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain is the story of “the first mountain in Wales” and depends for whatever plot energy it might have upon an understanding that the Welsh still resent being considered part of England. Apparently.
This is a period piece set in 1917 when almost all the men in Britain of fighting age were either off fighting World War I, home injured, or dead. Grant plays a junior government cartographer supporting his brassy senior in surveying the heights of Wales. In the first village they come to, that which they have always believed to be a mountain falls short by 16 feet and is fated to be marked on maps as just a hill. A clear insult to their virility from bossy Englishman!
The movie overall reminds me of plenty of other films like Local Hero, The Seventh Stream, and Waking Ned, only not nearly as well done. Very cute idea, I suppose, but the romance that’s supposed to drive Grant’s character to the necessary conclusion is forced and neglected–when he first kissed Tara Fitzgerald I couldn’t understand why, or at least why she responded with so much passion, since the set up was not nearly sufficient.
Grant was coming off his first big hits, Sirens and Four Weddings and a Funeral, and one wonders if the accompaying publicity work and/or notoriety were getting inside his head because his energy level is quite far down the scale from those efforts. Perhaps he was attempting to ‘act’ and show he didn’t always play the same character each time out. Colm Meany, with a juicy role as the only healthy young man in the village to service all the lonely ladies, does somewhat better but not up to his work in, say, The Snapper or The Van.
Not recommended
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