If you are searching for comparisons to help you decide whether to watch "Cold Comfort Farm" imagine a slightly older "Pollyanna" going to live on a rundown version of "Babe's" English farm with a strange and bleak collection of her country cousins.

This is an excellent and very earthy adaptation of Stella Gibbon's 1932 satirical novel (which itself is an odd marriage of Hardy and Wodehouse). Where the village pub is named "The Condemned Man" and the cows are named Aimless, Feckless, Graceless, and Pointless. Both the novel and its adaptation are joyfully depressing and packed with literary eccentricity and subtle humor. If you like "Faulty Towers" then you can expect to get off on the humor. But if you prefer "Hot Shots! Part Deux", you should probably pass on "Cold Comfort Farm".

There are three possible viewer reactions: It's not funny. I didn't figure out it was a comedy until halfway through but then I found it hilarious. I couldn't stop laughing.

Kate Beckinsale plays Flora Poste (always referred to by her relatives as Robert Poste's daughter),a recently orphaned 19 year old who chooses to live with relatives (the Starkadders) she has never met, at gloomy Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. Beckinsale, even more radiant than usual, pulls off a nice characterization of the resourceful yet snobbish heroine. Like Pollyanna, she is a catalyst for positive change, but they are calculated changes. Her instinctive snobbishness (Beckinsale has a real talent for this) is played for laughs since everyone would feel a bit superior and distanced from this eccentric collection of misfits.

The adaptation nicely incorporates Gibbons's subtle parody of Jane Austen romantic clichés, from the controlling madwoman in the attic to wood nymph poetess, to the quivering parishioners. Even the production design is a funny send-up of the standard BBC mini-series look.

This is really a terrific production, doubly so for Beckinsale fans.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale) is a superficial young woman recently orphaned with no work skills. She tells her friend Mrs. Mary Smiling (Joanna Lumley) that she wants to be a writer but only when she's 53 after some living. She is counting on living off of her relatives but only a few of her country relatives offer. Distant cousin Judith Starkadder (Eileen Atkins) offers the rundown Cold Comfort Farm. She is married to Amos (Ian McKellen) and has a womanizing son in Seth (Rufus Sewell). Flora insists on bettering the unhappy farm.

This is a comedy but just not really my kind of comedy. It's based on a British comic novel from the '30s. It skewers the romantization of the English country farm life from British literature. It's a dated comedy from another era and it's British. It has its charms but I can't find any big laughs.

"Cold Comfort Farm" has a familiar plot, but is very well done. Portraying young Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale) moving in with her backwards relatives in 1930s England and trying to change everything, the movie has the perfect pacing. It's the sort of situation where her relatives sort of irk you, but you can't help but admire them (mainly due to Flora's snobbish attitude about everything). It just goes to show what a great director John Schlesinger ("Midnight Cowboy", "The Day of the Locust", "Pacific Heights") was. He will definitely be missed. Also starring Eileen Atkins, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Ian McKellen, Miriam Margoyles and Rufus Sewell.