Breathe
Andy Serkis (2017)
Breathe purports to tell the true story of the life shared by Robin and Diana Cavendish. In 1958, a year after their marriage, Robin was diagnosed with poliomyelitis and doctors gave him only three months to live. He and his marriage to Diana survived for another thirty-six years. Although paralysed from the neck downwards and able to breathe only through the help of a mechanical ventilator, Cavendish became an unflagging advocate for the physically disabled and played a significant role in the development of disability aids, especially for British responauts. Andy Serkis had a deserved success playing the polio sufferer Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010) but Breathe, the first film that he’s directed, is weak. The episodic narrative has no momentum. The pace is unvarying. Breathe is a motion picture going through the motions and I spent most of its two hours assuming that the underlying problem was Serkis’s inexperience behind the camera. No doubt this does play a part but another possible explanation emerges at the very end. Text on the screen summarises the afterlife of Diana Cavendish and of her and Robin’s only child, a son born just weeks after the onset of Robin’s polio. Diana is still going strong today. The news that Jonathan Cavendish grew up to be a film producer comes initially as a relief. The film has portrayed Jonathan, even in his early twenties, as such a trembling wimp (Dean-Charles Chapman) that you’ve wondered fearfully what became of him. But then we learn that Jonathan conceived and produced Breathe as ‘a ‘tribute to his parents’. That may be a noble enterprise but it doesn’t guarantee a decent drama. (Robin Cavendish’s life might have made for a stronger documentary). Is it the producer’s strong personal engagement in the project that’s resulted in direction of such respectful, cautious dullness?
The upper-middle-class scene-setting and the protagonists’ courtship at the start are perfunctory. Period sports car, Robin (Andrew Garfield) at the wheel, whizzes down country lane en route to cricket match. Robin hits a six, in the process smashing china teacups set out by the pavilion and spotting Diana (Claire Foy) among the spectators. He’s warned that this English rose is a ‘heartbreaker’ but it’s love at first sight – they’re soon married and out in Keen-ya, where Robin works as a tea broker. Breathe is marking time until illness strikes him down – what’s startling is that it gives the same impression once he’s contracted polio and the Cavendishes return to Britain. In spite of the flatness of William Nicholson’s script, there were things I didn’t follow. How does Robin’s grim initial prognosis improve? If the answer is through his exceptional strength of will, there’s not much evidence of this – not, at least, until his friend, the scientist and inventor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), develops a wheelchair with a built-in respirator that means Robin isn’t permanently bedridden. Diana is oppressed by the family’s parlous financial situation but only for a moment: their lifestyle looks materially comfortable – enough, at least, for them to host, over the years, a succession of parties in the grounds of their home. There’s a single mention of Robin’s successfully playing the stock market – is this how he and Diana continue to manage? She has identical twin brothers (Tom Hollander), who share some early scenes together. I can’t explain quite how but these seem artificial (compared with, say, the corresponding scenes in Legend). Is this why, after a while, Andy Serkis features either one twin or the other (or perhaps the same one continuously) until a brief dual reappearance near the end?
As Robin Cavendish embarks on his campaign to improve the lot of other disabled people, the film’s shallowness becomes seriously problematic. It’s only to be expected that the medical establishment is instantly dismissed as unsympathetic and bureaucratic but the racial stereotyping is harder to swallow: Germans are ice-hearted technocrats whereas Spaniards (as the Cavendishes’ holiday in their country reveals) are warm and life-loving. Once Robin has delivered a rousing speech at an international disability conference, his campaigning work, as far as the film is concerned, is done. Andy Serkis surprisingly decides to underlines the sketchiness of the story he’s telling by putting year dates up on the screen. The speech in Germany is given in 1973; the narrative then jumps forward to 1981 and the events leading up to the euthanasia that Robin persuades his doctor and friend (bland Stephen Mangan) to administer. It’s rather astonishing to learn that Robin Cavendish actually died in 1994. Thirteen years have been docked from a life whose length defied expectations because they were, it seems, a narrative inconvenience in this ‘tribute’.
Breathe naturally invites comparison with The Theory of Everything (2014) and the new film comes off badly. Andy Serkis and William Nicholson do little to explore Robin’s feelings of remorse that his disability has imprisoned Diana as well as him. (This comes up in only two exchanges between them, one of which is humorous.) Robin is suicidally depressed in the first stages of his paralysis but, as he tells the disability conference in Germany, ‘I decided to live – my wife told me to’. It really does seem to be as simple as that. Although the character of Robin is much more broadly written than that of Stephen Hawking, Andrew Garfield’s charm and skill allow him to go some way to emulating Eddie Redmayne’s achievement in the able-bodied part of The Theory of Everything – creating a personality strong enough to give the viewer a continuing sense of what illness has taken away. Garfield is much reduced in a role that doesn’t exploit his native eccentricity. He doesn’t express much while silent as well as immobile but he finds a kind of eccentricity in Robin’s extreme poshness, which helps once he regains his voice. Diana Cavendish’s selfless devotion to her husband, punctuated by occasional moments of anguish and exasperation, doesn’t give Claire Foy much to work with (Diana has nothing like the semi-independent life that Felicity Jones’s Jane Hawking built for herself). However, Foy has perhaps the strongest moment in the film. Her face is transformed as Diana takes in what a doctor tells her about Robin’s illness and she realises that her life isn’t going to be the mostly pleasurable and comfortable one she’d expected. This facial transformation may not be realistic but it is dramatically powerful – and, as such, virtually unique in Breathe. The protagonists are evidently courageous and admirable yet their son’s loving commemoration of them, sad to say, sells Robin and Diana Cavendish short.
7 November 2017