Salmon Fishing In The Yemen is adapted from Paul Torday's debut novel of the same name. Whilst the novel was a political satire of Tony Blair's Labour government and its foreign policy dilemmas, Lasse Hallström's film adaptation, through the screenwriting of Simon Beaufoy, becomes a pleasant, if somewhat prosaic, romantic comedy.
Ewan McGregor plays career civil servant, Dr Alfred Jones, a fisheries expert who is reluctantly engaged in the absurd notion of bringing the sport of fly-fishing to the Arabian Peninsula. The character uses this unique opportunity to take his life in a completely different direction, akin to a salmon swimming upstream against the current to spawn. For the benefit of the audience, Hallström crudely illustrates this metaphor in an epiphany where Dr Jones turns and walk against a stream of pedestrians.
Salmon Fishing In The Yemen is pleasant enough but is ultimately let down by a reliance on stereotypical characters and twee set pieces.
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