Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

PREVIOUSLY: PERFECT SENSE

In this romantic dramedy released in 2011, based on the book of the same name by Paul Torday, a charming Yemeni sheikh seeks help from a bunch of British institutions to bring his dearest dream to fruition: To create a salmon run for leisure fishing in his desert country. Financial advisor Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) and fish scientist Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) start to develop feelings for each other as they work to accomplish this impossible task.

Oh, man. I really, really did not enjoy this.

I liked the book okay, I think? Not one of my favorites I’ve read for this project by a longshot, but I also didn’t hate it. I didn’t struggle to read it, but it also didn’t really stick with me.

The book is a satire, I guess, but mostly it doesn’t know what it wants to be. A satire, a spiritual tract, a journey of self-discovery, a tragic love story? It’s all of those things and none of those things, because it doesn’t really commit to any of them.

The movie changes quite a few things from the book, and I think most of it was for the worse. Spoilers for both the book and the movie follow.

Both Harriet and Fred are in relationships when they meet. Fred is stuck in a loveless marriage with an absolute frigid bitch of a wife (who’s even worse in the book, if you can believe it.) In the book, Harriet is in a long-term, blissfully happy relationship with a soldier named Robert. She’s known him for years. They’re engaged. In the movie, they’ve known each other for three weeks. They remind us of that over and over. The relationship was just sort of maybe starting to get serious when Robert gets deployed. In both versions of the story, his and Harriet’s correspondence is interrupted before he’s officially declared missing in action. But in the book, it makes sense why she acts like an obsessed, grieving partner. Because she is. In the movie, a guy disappeared who she’s known for three weeks. Yes, it’s sad and I’d expect her to be sad, but the way she behaves is incredibly intense over a guy who just got the “boyfriend” designation.

Meanwhile, Fred is such an absolute bitch to Harriet for so long in the movie. I get it, he has contempt for the project, but pretty much the second he has a real conversation with her in person in the book, he thaws. And I know the “I can’t stand your guts” to “I can’t live without you” journey is very much a trope in romance and that’s what they’re trying to do. But the vitriol is so completely one-sided. She just keeps up a patient smile at his derision and it’s just off-putting. She’s not in charge here. Why is he so determined to take it out on her personally?

In the book, by the time Robert is missing in action, Fred is tripping all over himself to console Harriet. Subconsciously, he definitely sees an opening, but he doesn’t allow himself to admit it. It is clear by then he has grown incredibly fond of her, and he is genuinely supportive.

By that point in the movie, Fred is still calling her “Ms. Chetwode-Talbot,” leaves a lengthy message on her answering machine asking when she’s coming back to work, and shortly afterward shows up at her home uninvited and unannounced. Even though it turns out his intentions are pure, it’s still…a lot. But even more a lot is the fact that Harriet snaps and calls him unfeeling and says that anyone without autism would know better than to behave the way he does. Seriously, she accuses him of being socially maladjusted and unempathetic because he must be autistic. And he’s like, “Oh, that’s okay, I do have autism, so you telling me I lack basic human decency didn’t hurt my feelings because autistic people don’t have those.” And it’s also unclear if he’s joking? If he is joking about being autistic, is he making a joke at his own expense or at the expense of autistic people? He repeatedly says he’s not good at jokes. The lack of a sense of humor is supposed to be a thing from the book, and it does not land here at all. What the fuck. I am not rooting for these two crazy kids.

More than expecting us to sympathize with two poorly written protagonists who are demonstrably bad people, the technical aspects of the movie began to grate on me. The framing of some shots is odd. Specifically, there’s a shot of Fred’s boss in his office teleconferencing on his laptop. For parts of the scene, the camera is out in the hallway, partially looking in through the office door. This takes up the right half of the screen. On the left side of the screen, we can still see down the hallway, with individual people walking back and forth. It’s such a strange composition. I’m from a culture that reads left-to-right, so I’m part of a sizable population that tends to look at the screen left-to-right as well, especially when there’s motion drawing my eye there. I kept watching the left side of the screen, expecting the shot was framed like that because someone was about to come down the hallway and enter the office. But no. Our attention was supposed to be solely on the office the whole time. So why was it shot like that? I have no idea. That’s just one example that sticks out the most to me.

There are several shots that are wide shots for no discernable reason. There are more shots where things are framed strangely and your eyes get tricked into going to the wrong place on the screen from where the point of focus should be. The compositions of shots don’t line up with each other but then they do but then they don’t again. Over and over, something about what we’re looking at just feels a little bit off. It feels bizarrely amateur for a film directed by Lasse Hallström, who’s been in the business for decades and has been nominated for best director Academy Awards multiple times. But then, this movie was nominated for three Golden Globes, so what do I know.

The editing also has this “off” feeling sometimes. It cuts to reaction shots over and over in a way that feels like they’re either stretching for time or the editor kept getting called out of the room and forgot where they were and ended up reinserting the same B-roll footage in multiple places at random by accident.

There’s a scene where Harriet and Fred are having lunch, and it’s a regular shot/reverse shot, back-and-forth close-ups on their faces. These shots show part of the back of the other person. While the camera’s focusing on Fred’s face, he lifts his glass and takes a drink. The shot switches back to Harriet. While she’s talking, we see the back of Fred out of focus. He sets his glass down. The shot cuts back to Fred’s face. He magically still has his glass up near his face. He sets it down again.

This is such a common, unimportant continuity error that it shouldn’t even be worth mentioning. It shouldn’t be that noticeable. Except that both times he sets the glass down, the Foley artists added a thunk noise when the glass hits the table, and the sound editors put it in twice. Back-to-back, thunk, thunk. So they must have noticed the continuity error, and then chose to draw attention to it. A baffling series of minor decisions indicative to the not-quite-right, almost uncanny feeling that permeates the whole movie.

Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor have no chemistry. Worse, they have anti-chemistry. The wonky framing and editing and bad script aren’t doing them any favors, for sure. But Ewan is still so stiff with her way past the point where they should at least be friends. I don’t know if he’s still trying to play the uptight scientist who doesn’t know how to do feelings, but it reads like he just doesn’t care about her. And Emily seems like she can’t stand him. Even when she puts on a sweet tone, there often seems like there’s an underlying layer of…condescension? Contempt? It feels like speaking civilly to him is a physical strain on her. I don’t know how to describe it, but I would wilt if someone talked to me in that tone of voice. I don’t for a second buy that these two are falling in love with each other. I don’t buy that they can stand to be in the same room as each other.

Back to the general lack of quality control, there’s exactly one scene with subtitles, and the subtitles are almost unreadably tiny.

That scene sets up the sheikh as the target of an assassination plot. Fred takes down the assassin by casting a lure and hitting him in the ear with a fish hook, and this is played dead straight. At least the book was halfway funny.

Then they do the stereotypical Brown Person Life Debt. Fred saved the sheikh’s life, so someday, the sheikh must repay the favor. In the book, both Harriet and Fred stand by and do nothing and someone else has to jump in and save the sheikh.

The end of the book is completely different. First of all, in the book, Robert is dead. Harriet mostly leaves the project and still corresponds a bit with Fred, but they never get together and likely never even see each other again.

In the movie, Robert is miraculously the only survivor of his unit with no explanation. We hear about it over the phone. Almost as if that difference was lazily contrived. I know they had to change how long he and Harriet had been together and also they couldn’t kill him if they wanted to change it so Harriet and Fred got together in the end, but it just seems so forced and it happens so late in the movie. The press officer covers up the fact that he survived and “surprises” Harriet with a photo op. He dated this chick for less than a month months ago! Why is he not being flown back home to his mother?

Earlier, Harriet finally admitted to Fred that she was mourning the idea of Robert more than Robert himself because he seemed so nice but she never got the chance to know him. And it turns out the punchline to that is that this guy she’s been pining away for is actually maybe kinda racist. Those Arabs always get their money, says the guy who was almost killed fighting in an oil war. And then the next morning Fred tells him it really sucks that he wasn’t killed in action along with the rest of his friends. Again, what the fuck. What a dick. Our hero, everyone.

Like the book, the movie ends with a catastrophic flash flood, destroying the nascent salmon run right after the fish are released for the first time. But in the book, the flash flood is a freak accident. Fred says that after all that money, all that planning, he was most focused on getting the fish acclimated, and the engineers in charge of building the run never thought to add in fail-safes in the event of flash floods. Good old simple human error, hubris, man vs. nature, etc., etc. The prime minister (not the foreign secretary,) the sheikh, and the same loyal servant who saved the sheikh from the assassin earlier are washed away in the flood and killed. Fred, again, is useless.

In the movie, those filthy terrorists, men who only know how to destroy, are responsible for the flood because of sabotage. See, this time, Fred is perfect, and establishes contact with Chinese engineers who will take flash flooding into account. So something like this could only happen because some men are inherently bad. No one important is killed in the disaster. The sheikh survives because Fred is there. The sheikh repays his Brown Person Life Debt and saves Fred, and then Fred saves his life again. So presumably they’re not square and the Brown Person Life Debt has just been reactivated. And after all that, for all his mystical, spiritual talk, the sheikh is like, miracle shmiracle. Maybe, he thinks aloud, the terrorists had a point, actually.

No, movie. You do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to ISIL.”

In the end, Harriet ditches the war hero she dated for three weeks. She doesn’t give him a second look back after he tells her she was the “only thing” that kept him going in the war but now she doesn’t owe him anything. Fred’s a dick to her some more while she does some last-minute agonizing over the shoehorned love triangle, and it’s all still incredibly awkwardly framed and edited. But then it turns out the fish survived the destruction of the run, and the fish are a metaphor for Harriet and Fred’s love. Fred says they’ll try again and rebuild, and this time, they’ll try to do it with less colonialism. Maybe the terrorists won’t destroy it again if they make the terrorists feel included in the rebuilding. I foresee no problems here, this will all turn out fine this time.

Harriet and Fred hold hands as Harriet’s boyfriend realizes he’s officially her ex-boyfriend and drives away alone. I don’t think Harriet and Fred ever actually kiss on the mouth in the movie. I wonder if that’s because Emily and/or Ewan refused to do it. I wouldn’t find it surprising if that turned out to be the case. Big yikes. I am uncomfortable.

The last shot of the movie is looking at another “funny” IM conversation between the press officer and the prime minister. They’ll still be able to spin this to their advantage, and the stupid foreign press secretary is going to get a demotion to Fred’s old department for having the audacity to survive the disaster. Ta da! The end.

Ugh. You know, I feel like the book had a bit of an identity crisis going on, but at least it had something it wanted to say. I’m not sure how well it got the message across, but it certainly had ideas it believed in.

This movie…basic incompetence aside, I don’t think it has any idea what it’s trying to say. Except for undoing the anti-colonialism messages that the book makes impossible to miss. Which was like, the whole point of the story? The whole point is that Harriet and Fred don’t get together. The whole point is that they both end up alone. The whole point is that they put in all this work and it failed anyway. The whole point is that there are some things money can’t buy. The whole point is that for a single shining moment, it looked like it might actually work, and humans can make miracles come true. And yet, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. Don’t go chasing waterfalls.

The movie looks at the moral of the story and goes, “Nah.” They decide to make the main characters unlikable; take out all the comedy and satire; make it a dry, pointless slog to nowhere; and then have them succeed anyway because happy endings test well. It’s sloppy and vapid.

Beginners and Perfect Sense made me believe in love again. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was one I was actually looking forward to at the start of this project, and boy did it turn out to be a haymaker to my burgeoning sense of hope.

COMING UP NEXT: HAYWIRE