User Reviews

How much control should a government have over a farmer who is used to one way of running his business raising cows for dairy products? In order to sell, you must bring a particular amount according to the EU and that's impossible for some of the smaller farmers to promise to do on a regular basis. Anthony Hopkins as excellent as usual playing the farmer who passes on his knowledge to his sons, but they are more willing to play ball game with the new way of doing things, and as it comes to a head, Hopkins decides to take matters in his own hands in the most desperate of ways.

The plot certainly could be boring, based on regulations more than an actual story, but Hopkins provides enough meat to make this maintain interest even if it does get a little dry at times. Fortunately there's enough detail into his characterization as well as the presence of a devoted wife desperate to keep the peace and hopefully resolve things without additional conflict. It does come to a head where it seems like it won't be resolved, but the script does look at both sides by allowing the EU representatives to show sympathy choose a plate. For a while it seems nothing's going to happen seriously until Hopkins goes overboard, but then it becomes intense. If I learned anything, it's about the plight of people in Hopkins' situation blocked by red tape to do all that they know how to do.

A milk cow farmer in Wales is ruined by the regulations from Brussels. The father and his two sons react in different ways. The sons go into demonstrations, while the father, when he is visited by two EU bureaucrats, tries his own way of convincing them of the facts of his position. Of course, they fail to understand each other.

It's almost documentary in character, closely following the family on the risky road of progress, as the sons insist on modernization, while the father predicts it will be the ruin of them all. The mother is more sympathetic and tries to appease all hard feelings and possible elements of conflict.

At the same time it is highly dramatic, as the film starts in the end and shows how Anthony Hopkins is taken by the police, and in the course of the film you follow step by step how his fury is building up and you just wait for the blast, which ultimately takes very unusual turns.

The Welsh landscape is beautiful, and you can well understand how the Welsh farmer must love his land. The cows also play an important part, he is listening to his cows and teaches his granddaughter to learn about them too, and the scenes between the aging farmer and the child are perhaps the most interesting and adorable.

Anthony Hopkins makes an unforgettable performance, almost as usual, the farmer is not very bright or intelligent, unlike his sons, but is the more personal and extremely idiosyncratic - you can never guess what he will do next, and Anthony Hopkins is expert at such totally unpredictable characters.

All actors are perfectly convincing and natural, 'organic' as Polanski would have described it, and it's a very thought-provoking account at the same time as it is infinitely sad and melancholy. Hopkins' conversations with his dead father and his flashback memories add to the extreme humanity of this documentation. He never uses his gun, but his words cut the deeper and the sharper for their tremendous truth of an injustice to gross and deep to be able to be rectified.

When he is offered money for the loss of his cows and his farm: "How about our pain? Our heartbreak and despair? How much is that worth? Then there is the past, the memories. How much are they worth? Our history, our mothers and fathers, all gone, all lost! Can you work it out? Have you got the scales? Can you get it into figures?" The bureaucrat: "I am sorry, Mr. Philips, I can't quite follow."