The Hotel New Hampshire

Plot synopsis:
This novel is the story of the Berrys, a quirky New Hampshire family composed of a married couple, Win and Mary, and their five children. The parents, both from the small town of Dairy, New Hampshire, fall in love while working at a summer resort hotel in Maine as teenagers. There they meet a Viennese Jew named Freud who works at the resort as a handyman and entertainer, performing with his pet bear, State o' Maine; Freud comes to symbolize the magic of that summer for them. By summer's end the teens are engaged, and Win buys Freud's bear and motorcycle and travels the country performing to raise money to go to Harvard, which he subsequently attends while Mary starts their family. He then returns to Dairy and teaches at the local second-rate boys' prep school he attended, the Dairy School. But he is unsatisfied and dreaming of something better.
Brash, self-confident beauty Franny, is the object of her sibling John's adoration. John serves as the narrator, and is sweet, if naive. Frank is physically and socially awkward, reserved, and homosexual; he shares a friendship with his younger sister Lilly, a small, romantic girl who has "stopped growing". Egg, an immature little boy with a penchant for dressing up in costumes, is the baby of the family. John and Franny are companions, seeing themselves as the most normal of the children, aware that their family is rather strange. But, as John remarks, to themselves the family's oddness seems "right as rain."
Win conceives the idea of turning an abandoned girls' school into a hotel. He names it the Hotel New Hampshire and the family moves in. This becomes the first part of Irving's Dickensian-style tale. Key plot points include Franny's rape at the hands of quarterback Chipper Dove and several of his fellow football teammates. The actions and attitude of Chipper, with whom Franny is in love, are contrasted with those of her rescuer, Junior Jones, a black member of the team. The death of the family dog, Sorrow, provides dark comedy as he is repeatedly "resurrected" via taxidermy, literally scaring the family's grandfather to death at one point and foiling a sexual initiation of John's at another. John partakes in a continuing sexual/business relationship with the older hotel housekeeper, Ronda Ray, which ends when a letter arrives from Freud in Vienna, inviting the family to move to help him (and his new "smart" bear) run his hotel there.
Traveling separately from the rest of the family, the mother and Egg are killed in an airplane crash. The others take up life in Vienna at what is renamed the (second) Hotel New Hampshire, one floor of which is occupied by prostitutes and another floor by a group of radical communists. The family discover that Freud is now blind and the "smart bear" is actually a young woman named Susie, who has endured events which leave her with little fondness for humans and feeling most secure inside a very realistic bear suit. After the death of his wife, Win Berry retreats further into his own hazy, vague fantasy world, while the family navigate relationships with the prostitutes and the radicals. John and Franny experience the pain and desire of being in love with each other. The two also feel jealousy when John becomes romantically involved with a communist who commits suicide, and Franny finds comfort, freedom and excitement in sexual relationships with Susie the bear and Ernst, the "quarterback" of the radicals. Lilly develops as a writer and authors the story of the family, under whose noses an elaborate plot is being hatched by the radicals to blow up the opera house, using Freud and the family as hostages, which Freud and Win barely manage to stop. The family becomes famous, and with Frank as Lilly's agent, her book is published for a large amount of money. The family (with Susie the bear) returns to the States, taking up residence in The Stanhope hotel in New York.
In the final part of the novel, Franny and John find a way to resolve their love, and Franny, with Susie's ingenious assistance, gets revenge on her rapist. Franny finds success as a movie actress and marries Junior Jones, now a well-known civil rights lawyer. Lilly is unable to cope with the pressure of her career and her own self-criticism and commits suicide. John and Frank purchase the shut-down resort in Maine where their parents met during the "magical" summer, and the property becomes another hotel of sorts, functioning as a rape crisis center run by Susie. Susie, whose emotional pain and insecurities have healed somewhat with time and effort, builds a happy relationship with John, and a pregnant Franny asks them to raise her and Junior's impending baby.
The novel is evocative of the New Hampshire of Irving's childhood.

Tags: comedy, satire, romantic

Review:
Then you discover the other bizarre characters and their relationships and the movie becomes, to me at least, extremely lovable.Admittedly, Rob Lowe's acting isn't up to much, and that's glaringly obvious here, but it doesn't destroy the film, and there's great work, as usual, from Jodie Foster to compensate.Basically, this is a light-hearted, feel-good film that I would expect to have mass appeal.
Almost as good as The World According To Garp, which happens to be one of my favourite movies of all time.The excellence of these films is that they're so focused on the main characters in the movie, that you really start to know them, and care about them.
Here you follow the whole family from they're young 'till they're old, and you start understanding how they've become the way they are, and why they act the way they do.As Garp, this movie is also very much focused on sex and love, and in the most bizarre ways possible.
In Garp and New Hampshire the characters are not perfect, and that's what makes the films perfect...The cast also does an excellent work with their characters, everybody is believable.
And the director has done an excellent job pacing the film in a way that it doesn't move too fast, and it never bores you by going to slow.All in all: an excellent movie that I'd recommend to anyone who hasn't yet been completely brainwashed by Hollywood's image of perfectionism.
The ONLY movie I know "The Hotel New Hampshire" can be compared to is "The World According to Garp" - as this one based on a novel by John Irving.Sometimes this movie makes you think that it's a mediocre and senseless one.
In this movie, Jodie Foster is raped, she and her brother (Rob Lowe) want to make love and know that they will eventually - and they tell each other.
I love `The World According to Garp' as well, as movie and book and these two share a lot in common.
And how can anyone resist watching a film with such a wonderful cast  Rob Lowe, Jodie Foster, Paul McCrane, Beau Bridges, Wallace Shawn, Matthew Modine, Wilford Brimley, Nastassja Kinski and Amanda Plummer And Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster never looked cuter.
The story spans many years and places, and would touch on subject matters such as raising children, music, incest, homosexuality, communism, psychology, terrorism, writing, racism, hotel management and the recurring subjects with John Irving  at least in what I read  airplanes and bears (see Garp again for these too).A film that leaves you with a feeling of hope and a wish that you also knew these wonderful people.
But the single thread that runs through the film and ties the characters and their lives together is sorrow; and in this instance, using an extremely overt metaphor, `Sorrow' is the family pet-- a dog-- who comes to symbolize a seemingly prevalent condition of the Berry family in `The Hotel New Hampshire,' written for the screen and directed by Tony Richardson, adapted from the novel by John Irving.
The story centers on the Berry family, a close but eccentric clan, and is told from the perspective of John (Rob Lowe), who tries to make sense of his too familiar relationship with his sister, Frannie (Jodie Foster), his gay older brother, Frank (Paul McCrane), his literally `little' sister, Lilly (Jennifer Dundas) who `isn't a midget,' but who stopped growing too soon, the youngest of the bunch, Egg (Seth Green), his grandfather, Iowa Bob (Wilford Brimley) and his parents (Beau Bridges and Lisa Banes).John's father, Win, was a dreamer, or as Lilly called him, a `Gatsby,' always looking for something better, for `it.'  Win and Mother Berry had met one summer working together at a hotel, and when Win tires of his job as a school teacher, he decides their town needs a hotel.
And it is here that the memories of his formative years are made for John; memories like struggling with his love for his sister while she lives through a particularly traumatic experience that involves a boy of whom she is enamored, Chip Dove (Matthew Modine), and tasting love himself for the first time with a waitress at the hotel (Joely Richardson).
This is simply the story of the Berry family, for better or worse, with John telling it like it is while refraining from any sensationalism or judgment calls, to which the likes of a film of this nature would ordinarily be disposed.
Lowe gives a convincing performance as John-- arguably some of the best work he's ever done-- and he underscores his role of narrator by making the story as much about the others as about himself, which is generous, and a good piece of acting.
Foster, who would've been twenty-one or twenty-two when this was filmed (1984), displays an insight, poise and maturity well beyond her years, with a performance that is intuitively discerning and believable, and which serves the character so well while bringing her vividly to life.
The young Dundas is also very impressive in the role of Lilly and, like Foster, manages to bring the necessary maturity to the character that makes her entirely credible.The supporting cast includes Wallace Shawn (Freud), Dorsey Wright (Junior), Cali Timmins (Bitty), Anita Morris (Ronda Ray) and Walter Massey (Texan).
I read this book (along with  his other best-sellers "World  According to Garp" and "Cider House Rules") back in the 80's when they were published, and I thought they were great, serious  works of fiction full of colorful, off-the wall characters fleshed out  in  engaging prose.
Unfortunately, all of this is lost in this film adaptation.I don't know who Tony Richardson is, and if he directed any other movies, but if they are as poorly-lit, badly-recorded, ineptly edited, and  haphazardly narrated as this one is, I'll pass.Although the movie sticks pretty closely to the original, it just doesn't work on the screen.
And the actress (whoever she is ) who plays the mother has such a tiny part that she barely registers.Incest, rape, murder, accidental death, suicide, radical German nihilists with bombs, pornography, and a lesbian in a bear suit are all in this movie, and it's all BORING.All I can recommend is that you read the book.
Everything that is confusing, depressing, and just plain weird in this movie makes great, if quirky, sense in the book..
Instead we get bizarre and inane scenes, sappy music, slapstick comedy, hundreds of plots thrown in a blender, and sad attempts at drama.There are so many issues, and possible themes here, familial violence, homosexual assault, gang rape, interracial relationships, pedophilia (waitress and John, come on, both sexes can be abused and confused by it!), prostitution, bestiality, incest, violent death, family relations, terrorism, promiscuity, pornography, sexual confusion...blah blah blah.
From such works of grandiose fiction and fantastic imagination as "A Prayer for Owen Meany" and "The World According to Garp", it stands out."Hotel New Hampshire" is even more difficult, and as such it is a difficult novel to adapt to the screen.
"Hotel New Hampshire" is very faithful to Irving's original story, and has the same way of "floating above" the hardships and adventures of the family.
Love and compassion also play important roles, most of all the love between Frannie and John (the narrator) and the friendship between Win Berry and Freud (and Freud's bear!).The macabre humor is very typical of John Irving, who is a master at writing the deepest tragedy and still make you smile, but the humor serves a greater purpose: ridicule is a way to express outrage and frustration - and "Hotel New Hampshire" has its share of that: the rape of the ambivalent Frannie, the death of the poor old dog and the insanely funny way it refuses to release its hold on the family, the ridiculous radicals in Vienna and the tragic loss of family members.
Excellent performances, great scenery and attention to detail added to humor and wit makes this film a very good adaptation of Irving's fascinating novel.
While it is one of Irving's best books, and gives a lot of history for each character, the movie left the characters shallow and undeveloped.
Rob Lowe's performance (or lack thereof) really hurts the movie, but the adaptation of Irving's novel to the big screen (unlike Cider House Rules) left much to be desired..
Some people might find this a bizarre film but, like the book on which it was based, the "bizarreness" has a point (all families seem somewhat bizarre to those outside the family, though they appear perfectly normal to those within).The acting is generally good.
"Garp", at least, had a coherent story.The makers of this film must have thought that stringing together various scenes that appear in the book would be enough to hold a movie together because Irving obviously knows what he's doing, right?
Unlike "The World According to Garp," which was translated to the big screen brilliantly, "The Hotel New Hampshire" (which is probably my favorite John Irving novel) is a disaster.
Author John Irving's "The World According To Garp" made a decent movie not just because the director and the stars were a perfect fit--it was an interesting study of eccentric lives and behavior, and the paths the characters took were worth following.
Young Rob Lowe comes off as the star here; he's very easy and pretty as Foster's brother who harbors a crush on sis, but the other actors (Nastassja Kinski, Beau Bridges, Matthew Modine, Paul McCrane, and wizened Jennie Dundas) are absolutely lost.
The dysfunctional families in The Royal Tenenbaums or Little Miss Sunshine have got nothing on this lot.Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster are a teenage brother and sister who harbor blatant incestuous desires for each other.
There's also a child authoress (Jennie Dundas), a weightlifting grandfather (Wilford Brimley), a real bear and a dog with "terminal flatulence".Tony Richardson is obviously going for a type of bizarre, surreal, epic black comedy, and he has faithfully adapted John Irving's sprawling, near-unfilmable 1981 novel.
I am not a fan of either Beau Bridges or Jodie Foster but they perform well enough, it is just regrettable that Natasha Kinski spends most of the film in a bear costume.
After seeing and loving "The World According To Garp" - maybe the only film I've seen in the last twenty-five years that I thought was better than the book after having read the book first - I was looking forward to seeing "The Hotel New Hampshire", another John Irving book I had enjoyed.What a disappointment.
This film was so bad I left the theater hating the book as well as the movie - a unique experience for me!
I have no other explanation for this anarchistically surreal, whirlwind mess of a 110 min' film: The saga of a large family of eccentrics trying to make it in the hotel business both on the American east coast and Vienna - oh, apart from all their sexual shenanigans, encounters of counterpart weirdos and inexplicable hang-ups about circus bears, of course...From the word go, I'm told not to take anything seriously (sort of like in a Fellini-world), so I don't...
Though I'd say that you rather read the book then watch this movie, if not for anything, then for Foster's performance..
Based on a celebrated satirical novel by John Irving (author of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP [1982]  which I guess I should get to now), it garnered mixed reactions but I found it quite engaging apart from the occasional heavy-handedness; that said, having read the source material for myself, I have to say that the film falls short of extracting its full potential.
There is no real plot to speak of, but a plethora of oddball characters  not just the central family (among them Beau Bridges, Jodie Foster and Rob Lowenot to mention their compulsively farting dog[!]) but also Wallace Shawn as a cycle-riding Dr. Freud with a bear companion, Nastassja Kinski as the latter's 'replacement' after it is killed(!) and Amanda Plummer as a gawky teen dubbed "Miss Carriage".
The argument is completely ridiculous, and it gets worse as the movie develops.I can think of many ways to describe this movie; lame, boring, stupid, weak, grotesque, absurd, poor...Only if you're curious to see the young Jodie Foster or Rob Lowe I would recommend this fiasco.
Okay, it wasn't all bad.-Good music, except the New Year's Eve celebration-The architecture of the first two hotels-Old cars -Jodie Foster's hair and smile -In fact, Jodie Foster was quite good and I could have liked her character-Jennifer Dundas was also good But if this was supposed to be a comedy, it was sick, sick, sick.Seth Green was the first name I saw in the closing credits, which reminds me that in certain circumstances I can handle sick humor.
However, do I really want to see a film of THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE that highlights THOSE parts of the book rather than the events as a whole?
I guess, yes, in a sense, because the events of THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE did get to me and did put images in my head that bothered me, and the fact that this film has these same images does much to help me identify with what's going on.
The film adaptation of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP didn't try to capture all of these horrible and shocking things that occurred within the course of the book but rather set those aside in order to concentrate on telling a story and crafting characters.
If there were a story, I would have an easier time recommending it, but I think I will have to say that this is worth seeing by fans of John Irving's book only..
Win Berry (Beau Bridges) and his wife have five kids, John (Rob Lowe), Franny (Jodie Foster), Frank, Lilly, and Egg (Seth Green).
The family stays and renames the place Hotel New Hampshire.This is adapted from the John Irving novel who also wrote "The World According to Garp".
Rob Lowe trying to act, incest, gang rape, a farting dog, death, all in one film!
The Hotel New Hampshire is a bigger misfire than Tony Richardson's adaptation of The Loved One. Though I've never read the John Irving novel this disaster is based on, Richardson's hatchet job on Evelyn Waugh's Hollywood satire would suggest Irving's book is considerably better than the film.
It's as good , if not better than the film and opens up the world of john Irving to you-all his books are great, like 'The World According to Garp' or 'The Cider House Rules' etc...
First, I should note that I've never read John Irving's novel on which "The Hotel New Hampshire" is based.
I understand that John Irving liked Tony Richardson's movie, and his only criticism thereof was that it tried to be too faithful to the book, often making parts of it go by too quickly.
The cast includes Beau Bridges, Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, Nastassja Kinski, Wallace Shawn - whom my parents met around the time that "My Dinner with Andre" got released - Seth Green and Amanda Plummer (put another way, it stars the Dude's brother, Clarice Starling, young #2, Nosferatu's daughter, Vizzini, Dr. Evil's son and Honeybunch)..
No doubt, those who have rated this garbage highly find it Real Interesting to watch a young Jodie Foster and a young Rob Lowe acting as brother and sister somehow inexplicably being in love with each other and having sex.
In particular, Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe and Alan Bates all excel, but the talented Natassia Kinski, who spends most of the film wearing a bear costume, is sadly wasted here and occasionally the viewer gets the feeling that she would have preferred not to have been there at all.
John Irvings story seems to be asking: "what if?" Jodie Foster gets rape but recovers with strength and courage.
Bizarre cult movie about Family,Incest,Rape and a beautiful girl on a bear costume!.
The acting is top notch and the little sister is so good in her role,i wonder if she is still working as an actress,see this film with and open mind and you´ll like it.
The Hotel New Hampshire has to rank up there with maybe the top 10 of weird films I've seen.
Children like Rob Lowe, Jodie Foster, and Seth Green and a crotchety old grandpa played by Wilford Brimley.
But interesting characters without a coherent plot is a chair with weak legs.In the best part of the film Jodie Foster gets some sweet revenge for being raped by Matthew Modine.
Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster were blood brother and sister but had an amazing time having sex which was uncomfortable to even watch.
The film of "The World According to Garp" left me with the feeling "What the hell was that all about?" .I think that the difficulty is that Irving's books do not always transfer well to the screen.
In the case of Irving, however, film directors seem to struggle to find any equivalent to his authorial voice to hold his rather sprawling stories together.The plot of "The Hotel New Hampshire" would be difficult to summarise.
Indeed the characters themselves don't seem particularly moved by half these events, while I found the suicide of the daughter Lilly (played by then 13 year old actress Jennifer Dundas) who kills herself jumping out the window of a New York City skyscraper, especially sad.Although the strangest part of the film was probably the Rob Lowe / Jodie Foster incest scene, in which they (siblings) basically have sex all day long, and neither of them seem a bit disturbed about it either during the orgy or at any point later in the film.Perhaps this is a "dark comedy"?.
Though not as richly realized as THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, this is still a very successful film version of John Irving's novel.