Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor
“SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN” My rating: B (Opening March 30 at the Glenwood Arts)
107 minutes | MPAA rating:PG-13
With its gentle humor and forgiving view of human nature, Lasse Hallstrom’s “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” reminds me a lot of Bill Forsyth’s “Local Hero.”
Not that it’s as good as that sublime comedy (among the best of the ’80s), but it’s a low-keyed charmer that will leave most of us with bemused smiles plastered across our mugs.
Ewan McGregor is Alfred Jones, a scientist with the British Ministry of Fisheries. He’s a science wonk who takes his job of riding herd on Her Majesty’s wild salmon population quite seriously indeed. So he’s none too thrilled when someone in the Prime Minister’s office — hoping for some news from the Arab world that doesn’t involve an explosion — directs him to take a meeting with a publicist named Harriet (Emily Blunt) who’s in the employ of a fantastically wealthy oil sheik.
This Muhammed (Amr Waked) is an avid fly fisherman who dreams of establishing a salmon fishery in his native land. All that’s required is to build a massive dam, create a huge lake, and somehow fool North Atlantic salmon to reproduce amid the desert sands.
Alfred is dweeby, obtuse and a poorly-paid civil servant, while Harriet is hip, well-heeled and cutting edge.
Naturally they fall in love, notwithstanding Alfred’s long relationship with a woman who seems to have little use for him (after a round of perfunctory sex she declares,
“That should do you for a while”) and Harriet’s recent fling with a fella who’s a Brit version of a Navy Seal and is being sent off to some godforsaken hot spot.
McGregor and Blunt are just as charming as you’d expect, and the screenplay by Simon Beaufoy (“The Full Monty,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “127 Hours”) gives them plenty of clever banter to lure us in.
Amr Waked, Ewan McGregor
But the real star of the show is Waked as Shiek Muhhamed. This Egyptian actor (he played one of Sadam Hussein’s sons in HBO’s “The House of Saddam”) has an astonishing face and piercing eyes, and in his love of fishing this potentate is absolutely Zen-like. He’s like Alec Guinness in Obi-Wan Kenobi mode…only sexy.
So against his better judgement Alfred finds himself getting onboard with this hairbrained scheme.
“Salmon Fishing…” is far from perfect. A plot development involving assassins who think the sheik is too progressive feels a bit cheap, and Kristin Scott Thomas’ mugging as a Downing Street bigwig threatens to derail the whole enterprise.
But director Hallstrom, whose resume runs from “My Life as a Dog” to “The Cider House Rules,” “Chocolat” and “An Unfinished Life,” has just the gentle touch to make it seem mostly effortless.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
Excellent review of SALMON FISHING…the KC STAR screwed up royally in failing to keep Butler on board. Aspiring KC Star movie reviewers would benefit immensely from “Butler-mentoring”…..
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Exactly right. At points, in some scenes, this is an “A” movie: the writing, then, is lyrical; the acting excellent, the subtleties entrancing. When that happens, McGregor could be Grant or Tracy…Blunt could be Hepburn or Arthur: the chemistry between the two leads is palpable and engaging.
Unfortunately, as noted above, the director/writer muddies the story with the ‘terrorist sabotage’ subplot….with the British SAS background adventure. All of a sudden, rather than finding ourselves in the midst of a delightful fairytale, in which we willingly surrender our disbelief to the surreal nature of the whole, we are instead confronted by some sort of fundamentalist jihad and the death of deep-cover teams in combat. Those things are too real and too painful and they pull us, in shock, away from the dream of Salmon Fishing in The Yemen.
Small Spoiler Alert:
The film works when we as audience are able to make that leap of faith the Shiek invokes. It is magical when we trace the weightless flight of the lure across the flashing water in hope of ‘salmon’… but, sadly, it stumbles when the pilgrim, Alfred Jones, turns from these things to embrace the politically-correct “next time we’ll do this with the help of the people….thereby building consensus, making this their joint-community venture.” He stops short of requiring focus groups and preference surveys….but just barely. This is truly unfortunate for it flies directly in the face of the dream and the faith in the ridiculously sublime that gave this venture (and the movie) life in the beginning. The jihadist at the dam would kill the project because it was too modern; we fear, now, that Alfred will kill it by committee. The film could have been a modern classic….sigh….instead, a very pleasant might-have been.