Film review

Hettie Macdonald (2023)

Harold Fry (Jim Broadbent) spent his working life in a white-collar job at a brewery.  His retirement is no less routine and uneventful until the post arrives one fine morning at the suburban home in Kingsbridge, Devon that he shares with Maureen (Penelope Wilton), his wife of many years.  It’s a letter addressed to Harold and postmarked Berwick-on-Tweed – from Queenie Hennessy, a former work colleague, who informs him she’s terminally ill in a Berwick hospice.  Harold struggles to write a brief, regretful reply, though Maureen wonders why he can’t ‘use email like everyone else’.  He goes out to post the letter.  At the first postbox he comes to, he has second thoughts.  He walks on to the next postbox and the same thing happens.  He goes into a garage shop, where he’s served by a friendly, blue-haired young woman (Nina Singh) who finds the idea of snail mail amusingly quaint.  When Harold explains the background to his letter the blue-haired girl tells him her aunt had cancer but that ‘faith’ gave her hope; when Harold admits he ‘never really got the hang of religion’ the girl says she doesn’t mean religious faith.  Harold phones the hospice from a call box with a message for Queenie – he’s on his way to see her, she ‘must keep living’.  He then embarks on his journey to Berwick – on foot.

It’s hard to disagree with the adjective in the title of Hettie Macdonald’s film of Rachel Joyce’s best-selling 2012 novel of the same name.  Perhaps Joyce in her book (which I’ve not read) contrived to make the reader believe in the tale she was telling but, although she has also written this screen adaptation, the result never gets close to working similar magic on the viewer.  It’s harder in cinema than in literature to put the audience inside the mind of a character without showing the world that they actually inhabit but realistic probability is far from the whole problem here.  Even though the protagonist isn’t driven by religious conviction, the spiritual connotations of ‘pilgrimage’ set up expectations of something more than naturalism.  And Jim Broadbent is the right man to elevate Harold’s story into a crazy romantic quest:  he’s eccentric and (as Meryl Streep, accepting her BAFTA for The Iron Lady, described him) soulful.  As Harold Fry sets out, he has the benignly dotty, fervent air of an OAP Don Quixote but Broadbent gets little chance to exploit his special qualities.  The film he’s in is a clumsy, literal-minded plod.

The arrival at the start of an unexpected letter that upsets the apparently settled existence of an elderly couple evokes Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015) – and Harold’s baffling determination to walk to a faraway destination the David Constantine short story In Another Country, which inspired Haigh’s film.  An improbable means of transport for a cross-country marathon (which proves to be driven by a compulsion to make amends) also brings to mind David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999).  But these resemblances don’t go much further.  Whereas Mr Mercer in the Constantine story really is mentally confused, Maureen Fry, in a vain attempt to get someone to abort her husband’s expedition, fibs to a GP (Andrew Leung) that Harold has incipient dementia, citing as (her only) evidence that he left his mobile phone in the house.  In response, the doctor assures her that Harold hasn’t got Alzheimer’s, that what he’s doing is a wonderful thing and, absurdly, that walking is good for you:  it isn’t if, like Harold, you normally hardly walk at all and are now intending to walk 627 miles.  Alvin Straight’s insistence on travelling less than half that distance on his riding lawnmower (plus homemade travel-trailer) seems a modest, reasonable undertaking in comparison.  I never really understood why Harold – with cash and credit cards on his person (he posts the cards home to Maureen midway through his trek) and desperate to reach Queenie post-haste – didn’t just get the train.

Harold’s tediously familiar backstory is a drag on the remarkableness of the long walk to Berwick.  Very early on, a kindly farmer’s wife (Claire Rushbrook) who gives him a glass of water, asks if he had children:  he answers yes, one, a son.  It’s striking the woman uses the past tense, as if she already knows Harold is childless now – this is even before Jim Broadbent’s stricken face signals as much.  The farmer’s wife then inadvertently rubs salt in the wound with a dollop of homespun rustic wisdom:  a-man-needs-a-son-and-heir-otherwise-he’s-the-end-of-the-line stuff.  It’s clear from this point that Fry junior is no longer in the land of the living but Hettie Macdonald and Rachel Joyce eke out the tragedy of his decline and death in flashbacks that extend through most of the narrative:  David (Earl Cave, Nick’s son) wins a place at Cambridge University, self-harms in the bath, gets into drugs and drops out, finally hangs himself.  It’s a terrible role for Earl Cave, nearly silent except when David is yelling ‘I fucking hate you!’ at his father.  Yet the film needs this standard-issue tragedy, which wrecked Harold and Maureen’s relationship, just as it needs slowly to reveal Harold’s unpaid debt to Queenie and for his odyssey to become a media sensation.  Without them, Harold Fry is too boring for words.

And it’s hardly rich in images.  About to set off, Harold looks out from high on a hillside and murmurs wonderingly, ‘Who knew?’  It seems he’s referring to the lovely, sunlit Devon landscape; if so, it’s just about the last time he voices such appreciation, as distinct from occasional vague stuff about sleeping under the stars, etc.  In the early stages, obliviousness to his surroundings might be ascribed to grim single-mindedness – he trudges along head down, chanting ‘You will not die … you will not die’.  But Harold soon gives that up:  the minor attention paid to the variety of place and terrain he encounters comes to express, rather, a lack of visual appetite on the director’s part.

As Hettie Macdonald has shown in television drama (including the Kenneth Lonergan-scripted version of Howards End (2017) and Normal People (2020)[1]), she is, though, a fine director of actors and Harold Fry confirms this.  While getting a strong performance from Jim Broadbent or Penelope Wilton isn’t a big ask, it’s only fair to note that Macdonald’s sensitive handling helps others in the cast, in much smaller and sketchily written parts, to register.  A few, like Claire Rushbrook, are familiar faces, others not.  Daniel Frogson plays a young man who joins Harold during the journey:  Wilf is a former drug addict, estranged from his family, who says he’s now clean.  When he first arrives on the scene, he’s also an enthusiastic born-again Christian; after one night in the woods, where he’s spooked by foxes barking in the darkness, Wilf appears to lose his faith – at least he never mentions it again.  Soon after, he’s back on drugs and exits the film.  It’s another shoddy role, in other words, but Daniel Frogson gives it authentic feeling.

Maureen isn’t much of a part either but Penelope Wilton’s skill and conviction animate this emotionally shrivelled, querulous woman.  It’s instantly clear – thanks partly to the overdone bleak, minimal decor in the Frys’ home – that their marriage is dead.  They don’t have much to say to each other; they don’t touch at all.  The lack of communication turns out to give a bit of credibility to Maureen’s otherwise puzzling under-reaction to her husband’s disappearance:  his first phone call to tell her what he’s up to appears to cause Maureen not alarm but more than usual irritation with Harold.  It emerges that Maureen, wrongly suspecting he was having an affair with Queenie Hennessy (Linda Bassett, a potent though wordless presence), failed to pass on to Harold the latter’s parting message to him when she left Devon all those years ago.  This element – introduced as something Maureen confides in Rex (Joseph Mydell), the Frys’ widowed neighbour and a reliably sympathetic ear during Harold’s absence – seems meant to be important although when Maureen finally admits to her husband what she did it doesn’t have any obvious effect – or get in the way of the couple’s final reconciliation.  Maureen feels strongly, as Harold does, that he let David down but she’s also angry that her husband has never dared to do anything.  He shares this view too, even though it’s not quite accurate:  a flashback describes how Harold went briefly bonkers and set about trashing the brewery, although it was Queenie who willingly took the rap and lost her job there.  Whatever, the pilgrimage is an act of courage and Maureen realises she loves him after all.  The film’s closing words, spoken by Harold to his wife, who has joined him in Berwick, are ‘Let’s go home’.

When it comes to lead roles in British springtime heart-warmers, Jim Broadbent seems to have cornered the market – Roger Michell’s The Duke last year, now Harold Fry.  It’s ironic, given the actor’s naturally genial spirit, that a highlight of his work in this new film is the playing of his character’s less warm-hearted moments.  Television and press coverage of Harold increases as he accumulates, without trying, a horde of mostly young, banner-waving acolytes, who seem to think his journey represents a radically new and refreshing philosophy of life.  The looks on Broadbent’s face eloquently convey Harold’s discomfort with his cheerleaders.  He manages to give them the slip, after which they’re never seen again.

Nor are the media:  by the time Harold’s north of the Midlands, he’s such a celebrity that passers-by who spot him want to shake his hand; by the time he reaches Berwick-on-Tweed and enters a cafe with a ‘no beggars’ sign on the door, to beg a glass of water, the waitress and her stroppy manager don’t have a clue who he is.  I’d like to think this is intended as a sharp comment on the fickleness of press and TV interest but it probably says more about the film-makers’ narrative attention span.  A more persuasive development involves a canine rather than a human character.  Harold and Wilf are accompanied by a stray terrier that never gets a name but stays with Harold after Wilf and the other youngsters have vanished.  The terrier’s very likeable and gives proceedings a lift (except in worrying sequences where Harold, walking along the edge of a motorway, stupidly lets it trot along without a lead).  In a north-east town centre, Harold tells the dog, ‘Not long to go now’ and doesn’t realise how right he is.  The terrier has spotted a fellow waif-and-stray – an abject-looking young woman.  He makes his way over to her, receives a grateful reception and, when her bus arrives, jumps onto it with his new companion.

Since this isn’t a piece of 1940s Hollywood whimsy, we never expect Queenie to recover even when we’re encouraged to hope otherwise.  At one point en route, Harold makes another call to the hospice and speaks to one of the nursing nuns on the staff.  She tells him that, when Harold first phoned to say he was coming, she doubted the patient would survive long enough for him to see her alive, but that Queenie, after receiving the postcards Harold has been sending, has rallied remarkably:  ‘Maybe that’s what the world needs right now – a little less sense and a bit more faith’, says the nun.  At the business end of the story, this sentiment, like other things in Harold Fry, is simply discarded.  The blue-haired girl informs Maureen that her aunt died.  When, eighty-seven days after leaving Kingsbridge, Harold finally arrives at the hospice and meets Sister Philomena (Joy Richardson), who answered his phone calls, she tells him Queenie, at death’s door, can no longer speak.  He doesn’t even ask when her miraculous revival went into reverse.

Yet the story is still meant to be life-enhancing – because Harold dared and because the people he met on his journey were, as he tells Maureen, ‘so nice’.  As a reminder of this, one or two decent souls – like Martina (Monika Gossmann), a Czech doctor who can only get work in England cleaning toilets but who tends Harold’s badly-blistered feet and lets him stay in her home a couple of nights free of charge – feature in a feeble closing montage.  This is accompanied, as is most of the action, by generic ‘hopeful’ music.  It made me think:  why don’t the people who make films like this save time and money by using exactly the same music every time – a rent-a-score arrangement – instead of reinventing the wheel?  Since no one seems to be credited on IMDb with the music for The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, perhaps this idea has already been put into practice.

4 May 2023

[1] Macdonald and Lenny Abrahamson each directed six of the twelve episodes of Normal People.