“I’m sorry, but my war experiences have made me a trifle … blurry.”
A Month In The Country (1987) follows the lives of two British veterans of The Great War, aka World War I, for a month of the post-war era.
One is an archaeologist, James Moon, an outsider to the community who’s been asked to find the bones of a non-Christian, buried near the cemetery. He also hopes to find evidence of a Saxon church. He searches for both between episodes of PTSD and blazing loneliness. He is one of the few survivors of his regiment.
A friend he makes is Tom Birkin, also an outsider, hired by the local church to restore a mural in their chapel. He sleeps in their belfry and is therefore awakened each morning by the clanging of the bells. Part of the progression of the story is his relations with various community members: the Church of England vicar and his wife, and a family who get to know him, have him ’round for Sunday dinners, and introduce him to others in the community. The vicar, meanwhile. disapproves of the hiring of Birkin for the restoration of the mural, but is ineffectual in the face of the funding bequest as accepted by his superiors, the local church council. He, and his wife, putter about their large house, doing little.
If this review seems a bit flat, well, that’s how the movie comes across.
Generally, I avoid reading up on the movies I review, but in this case, it being a while since I’d seen the movie, I glanced at the plot in Wikipedia and was pleased to discover there was far more going on than I, an American (or colonial, if you prefer) would pick up on. The happy little family isn’t members of the Church of England, but part of the Nonconformists, a collection of groups who cannot become civil servants, go to University, etc; I suspect they, in contrast with a vicar and wife no doubt representing the the empty character of the Church of England in the opinion of the storytellers, suggest the joyfulness and solid community still available even to a repressed religious minority in England at the time. There are strains under the surface that, for someone who’s aware, no doubt add a great deal to the sotry.
I may have to watch this again, trying to appreciate the subtle strains of a society still employing religious repression, while still subsisting on the deeper pastoral myths from the past. As a contrasting strain of thought, meditation on the opposite society in which all religions are accepted and associated bigotry is disapproved, may also be in order.
This isn’t a clumsy Hollywood blockbuster, but a surprisingly provincial story in that it doesn’t explain peculiarly British salients; audience must know of them going in, I suspect, in order to have a proper appreciation of the story. That said, it’s also beautifully made, and the putative mystery bothering these friends, unmentioned here, is a bit fun in itself.
This is that rare bird for Americans, a movie requiring prior research, but you may find it worth the time to do so.
