The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain

UK Release Date. 4 August 1995
Certification. PG
Running Time. 1 hour 39 mins
Director. Christopher Monger
Cast. Tara Fitzgerald, Hugh Grant, Kenneth Griffith, Ian Hart, Ian McNeice, Colm Meaney.
Rating. 51%

Review.

British filmmakers have a fondness for films where would-be interlopers are at first charmed and then subsequently embrace a local community and their way of living - Local Hero, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society. Christopher Monger's The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain is another such example.

The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain tells the story of two English cartographers sent to measure Ffynnon Garw - the 'first mountain in Wales' - only to discover that Ffynnon Garw is technically a hill.

Where Local Hero had warmth and charm, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain borders on twee, with an endless parade of undeveloped eccentric characters plucked from a second-rate Dylan Thomas poem.

Hugh Grant stars as cartographer Reginald Anson, post-Four Weddings And A Funeral, when his star was very much in the ascendancy. Nobody quite embodies the charming fopp, with all the accompanying mannerisms quite like Hugh Grant. Colm Meaney is wonderfully cast as the village scoundrel, Morgan the Goat. But the stand-out performance is from veteran actor Kenneth Griffith, as the agitated, exasperated and infuriated Reverend Jones. 

Billed as a romantic comedy, the romantic sub-plot, which once again paired Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald (a year after Sirens), is undoubtedly the weakest aspect of the film. Tara Fitzgerald, in particular struggles with a convincing Welsh accent and more worryingly, struggles to demonstrate the attributes that would beguil the hapless cartographer.