Schmoozing with the Sheik: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”

David Begelman

Film Critic

Swedish director Lasse Hallström is like the proverbial crab. When one compares his past films to his most recent offering, he seems to be walking backwards. It’s pretty obvious that’s the direction you’re moving in going from “My Life as a Dog” (1985), “The Cider House Rules” (1999) and “Chocolat” (2000) to his 2011 “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.”

It seems Hallström’s most recent film has a hard time hunkering down to a consistent theme. It can’t make up its mind whether to be a fairly undistinguished (if not gooey) romantic comedy between an English fisheries expert, Dr. Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor) and the hireling of a Yemeni sheik, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), or something else entirely. The project that sets the occasion for their meeting involves salmon stocking a newly constructed waterway in the sheik’s arid land.

Of course, Fred is married to Mary (Rachael Stirling) and Harriet is devoted to her boyfriend, Robert (Tom Mison). The latter is a British Army captain on call in foreign wars. How to pave the way for Fred and Harriet to come together after an awkward initial meeting in which Fred all but dismisses Harriet’s outlandish plans to do the sheik’s bidding? Easy as pie when scriptwriters put their mind to it.

Fred will be fired by his superior if he refuses to go along with the plan, ensuring that he and Harriet will be stuck together during its implementation. Mary and Robert, obvious enough roadblocks to nurturing any nascent thing between Fred and Harriet, can be dispatched without too much fuss. After all, Mary is a virtual shrike who is away from home for six weeks at a clip, while Robert can be scripted to wind up missing in action. What could be simpler, other than having Mary and Robert wind up expiring together after eating portions of contaminated salmon mousse, like the house guests in one episode of Monty Python’s 1983 “The Meaning of Life”?

Sheik Muhammed, the hugely affluent subsidizer of the impossible dream, is something else altogether. He is played by Amr Waked, an actor with a granite-like face the likes of which we haven’t seen since Anthony Quinn’s Bedouin visage in the 1962 “Lawrence of Arabia.” But looks can be deceiving. The sheik is virtually brimming with pieties he delivers with a penetrating gaze. Most of them revolve around telling others to have faith in this or that, as though he were oblivious to the fact that the Brits he recruits for his project are Christians historically steeped in the very item he is forever extolling.

The sheik has a castle in Scotland clearly the opposite of a modest accommodation. Sojourns there may account for his love of salmon fishing. (Is this the film’s cryptic political message about the possibility of westernizing Mideast potentates?) The going for him turns out to be rough. In the film, a group of Islamic terrorists attempts to assassinate the sheik because of his efforts to modernize—a.k.a. westernize—the waterway. (Fred saves the sheik by whipping his fishing line into the assassin in an adroit, if not especially believable, effort at fly casting.)

The really funny moments in the film are when Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), the press secretary for the British Prime Minister, delivers hilarious quips—including chastising her son for a minor infraction with an unrestrained use of the f-word. Her character is devoted not to the salmon project, but to a red herring: relying on the project to divert attention away from the war in Afghanistan.

As a cinematic effort, the film is hampered in its attempt to depict a romantic relationship, although McGregor and Blunt have undeniable charm as performers. Fred and Harriet are, alas, hijacked by a sophomoric political subtext and a sentimentalizing strain to the dialogue that brings believability down at every turn. Like the salmon in the script, Hallström’s movie has one hell of a time swimming upstream, much less spawning something really worthwhile.