The Hotel New Hampshire

John Irving's fifth novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, may be far from his best, but it's the book that most fully encapsulates the themes, motifs, obsessions, and fetishes that run through the popular New England author's work. Irving writes big, thick books that are difficult to translate into feature-length movies. Of the five attempts to bring an Irving novel to screen, the most narratively faithful yet least successful at capturing the author's idiosyncratic tone, scope, and emotional resonance is this 1984 effort by British director Tony Richardson. It didn't help that Richardson's film immediately followed George Roy Hill and Steve Tesich's magnificent adaptation of Irving's prior novel, The World According to Garp, which is one of the best screen adaptations of a novel ever made. Like the film, the international best-seller and cultural phenomenon that was The World According to Garp was a tough act to follow. Still, a lot in the book The Hotel New Hampshire gets under your skin opens your mind and makes you look at life from a slightly different viewpoint. Clearly, Richardson wanted to hold onto as much of the great stuff in the novel as he could, and as a result, he failed not make the drastic changes necessary to condense a 400-page novel into a feature-length film, as Hill and Tesich had done so effectively.

The film follows the traumatic adventures of a quirky New Hampshire family whose lives are defined by their patriarch's love of hotels and bears, as well as the other characters' various sexual identities, obsessions, perversions, and experiences. Unlike Garp, there are a lot of characters to keep track of, and Richardson casts them well. Rob Lowe is the narrator and Irving surrogate, John Berry, the middle child of five kids. John is a prep school kid in love with his sister who becomes obsessed with weightlifting after he's unable to protect her from getting gang-raped one Halloween. Jodie Foster plays Franny Berry, the second-oldest kid who shares John's incestuous feelings but is far more self-possessed and outgoing, at least externally. She's fiercely protective of her family but somewhat reckless when it comes to taking care of herself. Paul McCrane plays Frank Berry, the oldest of the Berry kids, who is bullied at school because of his open homosexuality. Frank is frequently at odds with John and Franny, though they fully accept his sexual identity. Jennifer Dundas plays Lilly Berry, their little sister who is literally their "little sister" because she stops growing at a very young age, and Seth Green plays the youngest kid, known as Egg, who never gets to grow into his own person due to medical issues and early death.

At the head of the family are Win and Mary Berry, played by Beau Bridges and Lisa Banes. The two meet as teenagers during an idyllic summer working at a resort hotel in Maine. Win is always trying to recapture the magic of that romantic start to their lives when they lived and worked at a well-run hotel and met a visiting Viennese Jew named Freud with a performing bear named State of Maine. Wallace Shawn plays the eccentric Freud, who convinces Win and Mary that they should get married, blow their savings by buying State o' Maine from him, and go into the hotel business. Others in the cast include Wilford Brimley as the Grandfather and football coach, Matthew Modine in a dual role as two very unpleasant guys Franny becomes involved with, Dorsey Wright as the Black football player who becomes the source of comfort and protection to Franny that John never quite could, and Nastassja Kinski as Susie the Bear, a traumatized young woman who has retreated into the persona of a bear, down to donning a full bear costume in many situations.

It's a lot, but unlike Garp, which spans the protagonist's entire lifetime, The Hotel New Hampshire basically has two sections: the older kids' high school years and when the family decides to move to Austria to help run the second Hotel New Hampshire, getting involved with Susie the Bear and a group of radical anarchist Germans hatching a terrorist plot. Unlike T.S. Garp, John Berry is a passive protagonist who mostly observes everything happening around him rather than acting on it. That can work great in a first-person novel, but it's the worst type of character to place as a central figure in a movie. Richardson's attempt to maintain so many of the novel's themes, subplots, and details ends up short-changing everything, rendering a story that would be hard to make credible on film feel all the more absurd. As if to comment on the implausibility and wackiness of so much of what happens, and perhaps to get through it all, Richardson often speeds up the playback, enabling complex events to fly by in a humorously condensed manner often accompanied by exaggerated cartoon sound effects. The technique fails completely at what it attempts to do and only makes us take the film less seriously when some of the most important things are occuring. You leave The Hotel New Hampshire feeling frustrated and underwhelmed by a movie that tries to overwhelm you and convince you that life is worth living no matter what it throws at you.