Greenfingers: Movie Review (2008)

Editor's Note: Home alone tomorrow night and nothing to do? Or maybe just home with someone who's close to you and you're each seeking an alternative option for a swell movie to rent? Allow me to remind you of an overlooked comedy from 2000. It's called "Greenfingers," and it stars Helen Mirren and Clive Owen. The original 2000 review runs below.

Not a bad way to toast in the new year...



The Joel Hershman comedy, “Greenfingers,” follows a group of imprisoned, blue-collar thugs whose lives are forever changed with the help of some unwanted weeds, rough hedges and a clutch of tendrils.

This odd mix of murderers, sociopaths and crooks--all of whom, incidentally, are about as threatening as a plucked petunia--are the latest to be saved by the redemptive powers of the British comedy.

Working from his own script, Hershman, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Los Angeles, has obviously been studying the recent successes of “Billy Elliot” and “The Full Monty,” not to mention the Ealing comedies of the 1940s and 1950s. He’s repackaged them, offering his own movie about a band of manly men getting a whole lot softer in the course of 90 minutes.

Loosely based on a true story, the film stars Clive Owen (“Croupier”) as Colin Briggs, a gruff, mysterious bloke sent to a low-security prison after serving 15 years in the big house for committing murder.

Now perfectly unhappy at Her Majesty’s Prison Edgefield, the grimacing, smoky Briggs eventually meets Fergus Wilks (David Kelly), an elderly “lifer” who hands over a package of seeds and urges Briggs to plant them.

Naturally, the damned things take off, somehow producing a vivid spray of double-violets in Edgefield’s infertile soil. Now, with the word out that Briggs has a splendid set of greenfingers, the prison’s first garden is set into motion, an event that not only turns these men into buttercups, but which garners the attention of well-known gardening maven, Georgina Woodhouse (Helen Mirren), her shy daughter Primrose (Natasha Little), and those who matter at the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.

What follows is predictable but well-acted, a movie that tries so hard to prove that even murderers have a heart, its seams pop from trying. The good news is that the film's heart is in the right place.

Mirren is fun as the showy Georgina and Owen proves he’s long overdue for a major Hollywood film, but unlike last year’s “Saving Grace,” the excellent British comedy that starred Brenda Blethyn as a sweet English lady who grew pot to pay the bills, “Greenfingers” finds a more modest sense of humor among the roses. Still, it's often in that modesty that it scores.

Grade: B