Cinema: A Merry War

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Gordon (Richard E. Grant), a copywriter at a London ad agency in the '30s, thinks of himself as a poet. But no one else is buying. Obsessed with strictures of class (his is "lower upper middle"), he woos his muse while exasperating Rosemary (Helena Bonham Carter), the art director of his ads and the love of his miserable life. If this version of George Orwell's 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying is too sunny for its subject, it provides a field day for the lanky Grant. His Gordon is self-absorbed, fulminating--the angry young man 20 years before Jimmy Porter--and utterly charming.

--By Richard Corliss