The “Real” Meaning... Critics Vie to Tell Us:
This is a simple meditation on salvation in the face of the horrors of experience. FULL REVIEW
— Michael Healy
L.A. DAILY NEWS (U.S.)
A Month in the Country is as much about the ravages of war as Platoon, Hamburger Hill, or Full Metal Jacket. FULL REVIEW
— Doug Brode
SYRACUSE POST-STANDARD (U.S.)
… On closer scrutiny, though, [Pat O’Connor’s] theme is there: the relationship of the past — its artwork and its culture — to our attempts to live a meaningful present and create any kind of a worthwhile future. FULL REVIEW
— Doug Brode
SYRACUSE POST-STANDARD (U.S.)
The theme of Simon Gray’s screenplay is the contrast between the peace and beauty of the countryside, the gentle, civilized nature of the activities of the two young men, and the turmoil within that each is facing. FULL REVIEW
— P. J. Kavanaugh
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (U.K.)
The point? Just as this old portrait of a “wintry” hard-faced Christ has been painted over, so the church has lost sight of its Christ. Weekly services have become exercises in lip service. ...Their work carries the two young men back into another time, a time when the congregation kept God alive through good works and genuine piety. FULL REVIEW
— Mike McGrady
NEWSDAY (U.S.)
Playwright Simon Gray, working from J. L. Carr’s novel, has fashioned a script whose delight is in the rounded reality of its characters... FULL REVIEW
— Tom Hutchinson
MAIL ON SUNDAY (U.K.)
No characters or actions in the movie have any life independent of their symbolic functions. All too clearly, the two ex-soldiers scraping away at the masonry of the past are emblematically excavating their own — and their country’s — wounds. All too clearly the vicar and his wife symbolize the obverse sides of love, the austerely divine and the tenderly human. And in case we are slow to pick up on the post-WWI “God is dead” hints, we have an agonized Firth screaming at the church in one scene, as Sunday prayers boom mellifluously out from it. “God? What God? There is no God!” FULL REVIEW
— Nigel Andrews
FINANCIAL TIMES (U.K.)
A Month in the Country is about the restorative powers that we have on each other, how yearning for someone or anticipating something gets us through life, brings out our true potential, and, in Tom’s case, makes him better. FULL REVIEW
— Joe Batake
SACRAMENTO BEE (U.S.)
For O’Connor, the Oxgodby sun that he either invents or captures becomes an emblem for whatever goodness can be wrested from a life in which pleasures are only fleeting bits of grace notes of dappled happiness between the larger expanses of sorrow, regret, and pure pain. FULL REVIEW
— Deborah Jerome
(NEW JERSEY) RECORD (U.S.)
... Here’s a heart-lifting British movie which becomes a holiday for the spirit. Its perception of the world after the First World War is not just luxuriant nostalgia. It is about values as abiding as they are affirming. FULL REVIEW
— Tom Hutchinson
MAIL ON SUNDAY (U.K.)
It’s a story of late-Edwardian rhythms, emotional reticence, and vapors of decayed piety. FULL REVIEW
— David Elliott
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
(U.S.)
A Month in the Country is perhaps the only film I have ever seen to concentrate almost entirely on the process of healing, and the capacity of one human being to allow the wounds of another to repair themselves over time, in the natural course of events. In the end, the Firth character has lost his twitch and stammer, and gained an invaluable insight into his own soul. And some of us in the audience have been instructed in the ultimate niceties of compassion. FULL REVIEW
— Andrew Sarris
VILLAGE VOICE (U.S.)
The inexpressible, in a way, is what the film is all about. There are buried meanings everywhere, and, like the mural, they can be uncovered only through painstaking care and sacrifice. Even then, the revelation may be opaque to many. FULL REVIEW
— Michael Wilmington
LOS ANGELES TIMES (U.S.)