Difficult to put a finger on why this is so much more cold than comfort. The premise, from Stella Gibbons's "beloved" novel, seems promisingly amusing: Miss Flora Poste, just orphaned at age twenty-three, means to live off the charity of relatives until, thirty years or thereabouts hence, she gets around to writing a novel "as good as Persuasion. " She selects from the various candidates a family of benighted rustics on a reputedly cursed estate in Sussex, thinking them good subjects for auctorial research as well as worthy beneficiaries of her personal intolerance for "mess" (another thing she shares in common, she points out, with Miss Jane Austen). Kate Beckinsale seems ideal in the part of the blissfully self-assured heroine, and the entire capable ensemble (Eileen Atkins, Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell, Sheila Burrell, Freddie Jones, Joanna Lumley) give it their all. John Schlesinger, their director, could not have asked for more. And yet. And still. And even so. Maybe the bookishness of the dialogue dooms the actors to a darker doom than even the doom on Cold Comfort Farm. (One advantage to keeping the dialogue between book covers, and out of the mouths of dialect spoofers, would be to cut down on the number of indecipherable lines.) Maybe another director would have been wise to ask for a little less. Maybe the plotting is too easy and pat and tidy even for a comedy, even for one centered around a Jane Austen emulator. Maybe too much of the humor is founded on the simple principle of repetition, repetition, and repetition. (How many times can an audience laugh at the line, "I saw something nasty in the woodshed"?) Or maybe comedy per se simply offers no special line of defense against the safeness and coziness of literary adaptation. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd