A Merry War

In this wry adaptation of a George Orwell novel, an aspiring 1930s poet (Richard E. Grant) chucks the security of his advertising job so that he can compose odes to his favorite subjects, ”misery and degradation.” The sharp script of A Merry War calls on Grant’s grand talent for comic agitation. Who better to rant at a houseplant for being a bourgeois symbol? With period-film habitué Helena Bonham Carter as his straight man/girlfriend. A-