Win Berry (Beau Bridges) and his wife have five kids, John (Rob Lowe), Franny (Jodie Foster), Frank, Lilly, and Egg (Seth Green). Win and his wife worked at a summer New England hotel where they met Freud (Wallace Shawn) and his bear before the war. Freud left for war leaving the bear with Win and telling the couple to get married. After the war, the hotel is abandoned and the bear gets killed by mistake. The family is a rambunctious bunch with farting dog Sorrow. The Berry kids get picked on by Chip Dove (Matthew Modine) especially since Frank is gay. Lilly has stopped growing. Win buys an abandoned school and turns it into a hotel. Frank and Franny pay waitress Ronda Ray to take away John's virginity. On Halloween, John and Franny are running to get an ambulance for a cop who had a heart-attack. Chip Dove and his friends catch them, and they gang-rape Franny. Junior Jones and the other black students come to the rescue. Frank had Sorrow stuffed. Their grandpa Iowa Bob (Wilford Brimley) dies. Freud invites the family to help run his Vienna hotel. Win had taken one of Freud's story making "Keep passing the open window" as the family motto. Of course, the tragedies keep coming. Mother and Egg are killed on the plane over. The Berrys find Freud blinded and Susie the Bear (Nastassja Kinski) working at the rundown hotel populated by hookers and revolutionaries like Miss Miscarriage and Ernst who looks exactly like Chip Dove. The family stays and renames the place Hotel New Hampshire.This is adapted from the John Irving novel who also wrote "The World According to Garp". The two movies have very similar sensibilities. This one has more main characters. It does have a feel of being overstuffed. Every character has some strange aspects. However, this movie is filled with memorable scenes and turns. These unforgettable characters are played by some very interesting actors.

The relationship between the cinema and the novels of John Irving has not always been a happy one. It always amazes me how a book as good as "A Prayer for Owen Meany" could be turned into a film as bad as "Simon Birch". With "The Cider-House Rules" Lasse Hallstrom managed to pull off his normal trick of turning everything he touches into pure treacle. The film of "The World According to Garp" left me with the feeling "What the hell was that all about?" .I think that the difficulty is that Irving's books do not always transfer well to the screen. They tend to be long, discursive, dealing with several different themes and with complicated plots and large casts of characters. These factors do not always make a novel unfilmable- there have, for example, been some great films based on the works of Dickens, a writer whom Irving greatly admires. In the case of Irving, however, film directors seem to struggle to find any equivalent to his authorial voice to hold his rather sprawling stories together.The plot of "The Hotel New Hampshire" would be difficult to summarise. It revolves around the Berry family and their five children, John, Franny, Frank, Lilly, and Egg. ("He began as an egg and he still is an egg". I hope you're happy with that explanation because it's the only one you're going to get). In the 1950s, the Berrys run a New Hampshire hotel which, with startling originality, they call the Hotel New Hampshire. Later on, for no good reason, they move to Vienna and run a hotel there which they also name the Hotel New Hampshire. (I say "for no good reason", but the real reason is that Irving himself had lived in Vienna as a student and couldn't resist featuring the city in his book). The film also features a performing bear, a dead dog, a plane crash, a dwarf who is also a successful author, terrorism, rape, incest, homosexuality and suicide. Have you got all that?One or two of the cast are quite good, such as Beau Bridges as Win, the Berry paterfamilias, Rob Lowe as John, the eldest son and the film's narrator, and Wilford Brimley as "Iowa Bob", the crusty old grandfather, but not all are of the same standard. A lot of Jodie Foster's films from the early and mid-eighties tended to suggest that she was fated to spend her adult acting career in the shadow of "Taxi Driver" and her other childhood successes, and this is one of them. As Franny she never really does much to suggest that later in the decade, around the time of "The Accused", she would emerge as one of Hollywood's top young actresses. The opening titles actually refer to "Nastassja Kinski as Susie the Bear"; when I first saw the film I remember thinking "well, that'll make a change from 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'!" In fact, Nastassja does not actually play the performing bear, who is played by a real bear. Her character Susie is a young woman who prefers to dress up as a bear because she does not like being a young woman very much.(Irving describes Susie as physically unattractive, so the ethereally beautiful Nastassja was hardly the most obvious choice to play her). "The Hotel New Hampshire" is not my favourite Irving novel; it is not, for example, in the same class as "Owen Meany". I did, nevertheless, enjoy it a lot more than I did the film. Director Tony Richardson is never able to make us believe in the idiosyncrasies of the various characters or to make us see any connection between the various disparate incidents that make up the plot. It is difficult to know what the film is about. Two characters have an incestuous affair, but it is not a film about incest. Another character is gay, but it is not about homosexuality. Another commits suicide (without any real explanation being given), but it is not about suicide. One is raped, but it is not about rape. Another is injured in a terrorist incident, but it is not about terrorism. Two more die in a plane crash, but it is not about air safety. Susie may dress as a bear, but it is not really about ursine transvestism. One could say of the book that it is about all these things (except perhaps air safety); the most one can say of the film that it mentions all these things but is not actually about any of them. 5/10

Given the people involved here, this is one of the most fascinating screen train wrecks I've ever seen. It's plain obvious that even if you, like myself, haven't read John Irving's novel which this is based on, a TV series must be the only way to adapt this, if anything to fit in its vast content. I have no other explanation for this anarchistically surreal, whirlwind mess of a 110 min' film: The saga of a large family of eccentrics trying to make it in the hotel business both on the American east coast and Vienna - oh, apart from all their sexual shenanigans, encounters of counterpart weirdos and inexplicable hang-ups about circus bears, of course...From the word go, I'm told not to take anything seriously (sort of like in a Fellini-world), so I don't... which has the effect that when dramatic, supposedly emotionally engaging incidents occur (gang rape, terrorism...) - I still don't! The characters feel randomly thrown into a huge tumble-dryer, spun around, taken out, some discarded, put back, spun around, etc until nobody cares, because although SO much indeed is happening, nothing is invested in them with this sloppy irregularity - not even a laugh.Too boot, we get poor sound effects (a farting dog? Hilarious... maybe for a 5-year-old!) & editing, fast-motion slapstick á la the old Benny Hill Show and over-acting to match, although Jodie Foster is always watchable. In most aspects, a truly terrible movie. Anyone think you're up for this challenge? You WOULD seriously be better off watching an old Benny Hill episode!2 out of 10 from Ozjeppe.

First of, this is not a comedy. Where was the fun? because I somehow missed it. I believe you'll find the movie to be insensitive and sometimes even gross. Also, the acting is quite disappointing. The argument is completely ridiculous, and it gets worse as the movie develops.I can think of many ways to describe this movie; lame, boring, stupid, weak, grotesque, absurd, poor...Only if you're curious to see the young Jodie Foster or Rob Lowe I would recommend this fiasco. But even in that case, it would be better for you to just watch "Taxi Driver" or "Youngblood" for instance.This is not worth watching. It's a terrible waste of time and I do not recommend it.