The Hotel New Hampshire

TV Guide Magazine by

This dreary satire of the post-war American family has a small but devoted following. Writer-director Tony Richardson has constructed a complex screenplay based on an even more convoluted novel by John Irving. It's a fairy tale about virtually everything and, as such, will not satisfy everybody. The film is laced with blackly humorous takes on heterosexuality, homosexuality, incest, abandonment, Nazism, masochism--a veritable laundry list of contemporary neuroses.

Miami Herald by Bill Cosford

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]

Empire by David Parkinson

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

Washington Post by Gary Arnold

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]

Newsweek by Jack Kroll

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]

Washington Post by Rita Kempley

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 New York Times by Vincent Canby

Like the novel, the movie means to be trendy but it is out of touch, though not exactly out of date.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.