During the war with Afghanistan, Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), the British prime minister's press secretary, has to find a feel good story involving the Middle East to deflect negative news reports from the area. She tries to find a fluffy story and comes upon one where a Sheik (Amr Waked) wants to import salmon to put into Yemen waters, since he is avid fly fisher with many estates, including one in Scotland near a river. He is forward-thinking and hopes this Yemeni project will make his country be viewed as more modern and a business prospect for other countries.
Harriet (Emily Blunt), who works at a consulting firm, is in charge of the Sheik's account and so compels government fish expert Fred (Ewan McGregor) to lend his talents and help plan and stock a fishery downstream from a dam the Sheik has built on the Yemen. Fred finds this a wholly useless enterprise, but is strongarmed by his boss and government people to do the project. This further strains his marriage, especially when his wife (Rachel Stirling) makes a business decision without him, and she goes away for a time. This leaves Fred with the opportunity to do the same, so he takes on the fish project. He gives outrageous demands to Harriet and the government, thinking this will derail the project, but every demand is met and Fred can't help but be impressed.
Meanwhile, Harriet has just met a new guy, a soldier (Tom Mison) who is soon deployed to Afghanistan just when her project is underway. When he is reported MIA, Fred convinces her to join him in the Middle East to help her get her mind off her troubles.
Although this is not a very deep film, it has some dramatic plot points. I find it charming and infectiously likeable. It is mostly lightly comedic and old-fashionedly romantic. It is not hard to predict that eventually the characters of Harriet and Fred will get together romantically, despite the problems the story manufactures for them. Kristin Scott Thomas supplies a lot of the humor, although there are many funny lines and stituations from many characters. The character of the Sheik is written as one of those foreigners who provide wise sayings to the Caucasian characters to help them with their problems that we often see in films, but Amr Waked plays it pretty genuinely without making it too sappy or mystical of a character.
McGregor gets to use his native Scottish accent which I think many Australian actors who have migrated to Hollywood should go back to doing from time to time. There is no sex between the two main characters (just Harriet and her boyfriend) and I don't even recall a kiss, even at the end, and in fact thought McGregor's character could even have jumped out of a 1950s Powell and Pressburger movie. The actress playing Fred's wife seems a little old for McGregor even though she's several years younger, simply because I think he always looks boyish no matter what his part is, and the role of the soldier boyfriend is not very dimensional, a plot device for the most part.
The film does has the "twee British comedy" vibe but not as overt as something like The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain, Waking Ned Devine or other films of that sort. There are no stereotyped small town folk or quaint old fogey who swears up a storm to liven up the scenery (that role is served by Scott Thomas, and the scenery is actually very nice with the area of the fishery in Yemen showing the expanse of the land to good effect). The main cast is actually pretty small. There are some salmon/fish metaphors as expected, most notably the swimming upstream against the rest of the world mentality. A couple of serious plot points to me seem a bit out of place, involving terrorism, but they are necessary to show how the local people do not agree with the Sheik's plans and to also show that his vision for his country may be too modern for them to understand or accept.
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