A charming Story fit for the whole Family, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011) has something for everyone.  It’s a veritable bouquet of inspiration on perseverance, faith, and cooperation between Muslims and nonbelievers (indeed, a lesson in faith to nonbelievers).  It’s got a satirical twist on corporate brokering and governmental agency with a scathing caricature of government and public relations, a bit heavy-handed but nonetheless rendered only as Kristin Scott Thomas at her comedic bitchy best can do.  It’s also a swell love story. 

Emily Blunt as a successful investment advisor beguiles in evening gown and t’s and khakis and is flown about in private jets and camped Arab tent style at the project site, the project being an infusion of salmon in an engineered river in the Yemeni desert.  Ewan McGregor is a government lackey assigned the unlikely project on account of the need for a positive news story about British presence in the Middle East.  (Funny none of these characters except McGregor carries an accent--Scottish--but I guess the movie is so far flung anyway it doesn’t much matter.)  Oh, yes, the quite recently acquired boyfriend of Blunt has gone MIA in Afghanistan, and McGregor, who has Asperger’s, is coming off an ill-destined marriage. Did I mention McGregor has Asperger’s? 

Is there anything this movie does not contain?  There is so much compressed into this movie I wondered that it was not playing on FF mode what with love, loss, grief, and love again, feats of engineering, farm salmon swimming upstream, the metaphor being also people find their rightful place if they believe.  Ahhh.  Well, yes, it’s schmaltzy, but aren’t all Lasse Hallstrom films?  Awfully ingenious, too.  And, not only can the whole family watch it, I dare say it pretty obviously sneaks in some lessons on ethnic and religious tolerance and conservative political leaning, too.  As if Hallstrom would ever find it hard to get his projects funded anyway.