THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE—quirk as substance. Having enjoyed John Irving’s big bestseller “The World According To Garp” and the very good 1982 movie made from it, I dutifully read his next novel, the 432-page ‘screwball family’ wade that became this 110-minute 1984 picture. Four decades on, I recall being iffy about the novel and disappointed with the film. Checking in again in 2023 validates and reinforces the earlier opinions: apart from stray moments from some members of the cast, the movie is a mess. A comedy-drama where the contrived comedy isn’t funny and the blunt-forced drama is mostly merely mean, its a mishmash of frantic preciousness and off-putting cruelty. Another director may have made it work (you’d still have the absurd characters and subject matter to contend with) but in the sledgehammer hands of Tony Richardson, who also wrote the script, it’s an indignity parade.

New Hampshire, the 1950s. Dreamer ‘Win Berry’ (Beau Bridges) buys a dilapidated school and turns it into a hotel. Later in the 60s, he takes his close—some too-close—tribe (wife, 5 offspring and stuffed dog) to Vienna to run another establishment. Life’s occasional sudden lurches test them (with a regularity that rivals the Kennedy’s) but the bonds of love (and fable whim) hold firm. All that zany fun, complete with humiliations, beatings, gang rape, incest, a plane crash, a woman who dresses like a bear, dead pets, Austrian Communist terrorists, a bombing resulting in blindness, and a suicide.

Richardson’s tone-deaf approach further minces the already alienating aspects into a patience-grinder of choppy editing, gauzy camera work (complete with speeded-up idiocy) and miscasting. As the assault-plagued, incestuous brother & sister, Rob Lowe, 19, and Jodie Foster, 20, have the largest roles; he’s not bad, but this isn’t her finest hour. Anita Morris gets a few smiles as a seductive waitress and the always offbeat Amanda Plummer scores her few scenes as a lonely member of the Viennese radical cell. Morris’s sly sexiness and Plummer’s plaintive humanity stick out not just because the two actresses are good, but because everyone else in the scenario feel false, their characters merely plot-point receptacles for odd behaviors and nasty encounters. Since we don’t believe them, it’s hard to care for them, and Richardson’s distancing direction further shoves caring into apathy. The movie seems to take a perverse delight in making the viewer uncomfortable. The Bates Motel is more appealing.

With Paul McCrane (awkward as the gay brother), Nastassja Kinsky (stuck in the stupid bear suit), Wilford Brimley (trying to do something as the crusty grandpa), Jennifer Dundas (flatline delivery as the younger sis), Matthew Modine (dual roles, one as sneering jock and rapist, another as a Eurotrash pornographer, that one dubbed to boot), Wallace Shawn (barf, this elf’s ‘charm’ eludes me eternally), Lisa Banes (the mother, barely sketched), Seth Greene (9, debut, the littlest brother), Dorsey Wright (ill at ease), Jonelle Allen, Cali Timmins, Joely Richardson.

Made for $7,500,000, it bombed out in the States, a $5,143,000 gross just 107th for the year. It reportedly did better in Europe. Now that we’ve stayed again at this inn of whimsy & woe, we can confirm there won’t be another return visit.

The family that suffers together…and keeps on suffering