A good movie, if you can willingly suspect disbelief

Lasse Hallestrom's Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a delightful if entirely preposterous British rom-com that makes no sense if you think about it for even a few minutes, but why would you? The film is craftily disarming, as it's about a crazy scheme - as the title suggests, to build a wild-salmon fishery in the Yemeni desert - that all the participants know is crazy and unlikely but they are obligated to try to make it work. A repeated line in the movie: It's theoretically possible, like a manned journey to Mars is theoretically possible. The rom part of the com is the evolving relationship between the two protags, Ewan McGregor as a nerdy fisheries scientist who's recruited to take on this project and Emily Blunt as some kind of investment counselor (her role never fully clear) who represents the oil sheik who wants to use his personal fortune to make this happen. As the film often reminds us: the relationship between these two is "theoretically possible." If you've ever seen a movie in your life, you know that it will be more than theoretical. Salmon Fishing is lighthearted and warmly if even foolishly optimistic - the kind of good-spirited comedy about talented and sensitive social misfits that Hallestrom has developed over many years. You have to willingly suspend a lot of disbelief to go along with this movie, and you also have to abide by a number of movie tropes, or even cliches, You have to accept the possibility that the love of a good woman can completely change a man's personality. You also have to accept an oil sheik who talks like Khalil Gibran and who truly wants to invest his personal fortune to bring water to parched desert communities. You have to accept yet another press secretary bitch, though she's played with great elan by Kristin Scott Thomas in a movie-stealing role. You have to accept yet another the bitchy wife who gets cast aside and deserves it. And, though in the world we live in "missing in action" means "dead," as McGregor awkwardly puts it, not so in movies (or literature): missing in action means still alive and due to turn up later in the narrative. And yet: it's easy to accept all that in this nicely paced and sometimes very funny movie, and if the end seems too pat and too improbable, so be it, thi is Hollywood (or in this case, CBS and the BBC).