The Hotel New Hampshire

While it is decidedly not to all tastes, The Hotel New Hampshire is a fascinating, largely successful adaptation of John Irving’s 1981 novel. Writer-director Tony Richardson has pulled off a remarkable stylistic tight-rope act, establishing a bizarre tone of morbid whimsicality at the outset and sustaining it throughout.

A brave effort from Richardson with another outstanding performance from Foster.

Hotel New Hampshire wants to be both charming and tough: a fairy tale with wings of steel. Its engines roar, but it doesn't fly. [2 Apr 1984, p.85]

Like the novel, the movie means to be trendy but it is out of touch, though not exactly out of date. It has no recognizable center of interest, no anchor for our attention. It's a series of whoopee-cushion gags...More than anything else, The Hotel New Hampshire is exhausting.

Irving is a generalissimo of literary assault techniques, shameless about shifting his emphasis from, say, the lewd to the sanctimonious on a moment's notice if he perceives an emotional advantage, particularly one lending itself to convulsive moral indignation. [17 March 1984, p.C8]

I'm pretty sure that the Marquis de Sade would like it. But it's not a movie for everybody. Only those who laugh till they cry when they see a couple of heart attacks. [9 March 1984, p.23]

The Hotel New Hampshire, in which John Irving's novel comes to the screen, is such a mess that it does not feel like a film at all. It's a kind of endurance contest, an epic bout with the cutes, in which the audience is made to confront a long, quirky line of performers playing oddball "types," and is then given only a handful of platitudes by which the explain the experience. "Sorrow floats" is the story's most profound statement, though there are others. [3 Apr 1984, p.C5]