This film captured Hugh Grant just after Four Weddings and a Funeral, which is to say, at the height of his stammering romantic-lead charm. Like so many Grant characters, his protagonist here would have had an awfully hard time spitting out this title. In one of those quirky, ensemble comedies from the British Isles that’s full of colorful villagers making mischief (The Full Monty, Waking Ned Devine, Calendar Girls, et al), Grant plays an English surveyor making an official map of a Welsh village, whose residents are insulted to learn that their pride and joy, a local peak, rises a few feet too short to qualify as a mountain. They conspire all manner of tomfoolery to keep him from leaving town until they can pile enough dirt and rock on the hill for Grant to reclassify it. Part of the plan involves a local woman of dubious virtue (Tara FitzGerald, who also played Grant’s wife in Sirens). How charming you’ll find all of this depends on your tolerance for small-town eccentricity. (And tweed: They could have raised the mountain just by piling all the film’s wool costumes on top.) The movie earned a respectable $11 million in the US, so all that wool and Welsh whimsy didn’t go to waste.
