William Nicholson (2019)
Now in his early seventies, William Nicholson has enjoyed a long and successful screenwriting career but this is only the second cinema feature he has directed too. It’s more than twenty years since the first one, Firelight (1997). According to Wikipedia, he has also written just two stage plays but they were both well received. He turned his first play into what remains his best screenplay, for Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands (1993). Nicholson’s second stage play, The Retreat from Moscow, was successfully produced on Broadway in 2003. He has now adapted it for the screen as Hope Gap, the story of the ending of a nearly thirty-year marriage and the fallout for the couple involved and their adult son.
As I watched the film I guessed it derived from a theatre piece although it was only afterwards that I read about its provenance. Since I don’t know The Retreat from Moscow some of what follows is guesswork too but I suspect that part of what goes wrong with Hope Gap is a consequence of its stage origins. Pretty well the first hour of screen time is devoted to events over the course of one weekend. Jamie (Josh O’Connor), who has some kind of IT job in London, where he lives alone, visits his parents, Grace (Annette Bening) and Edward (Bill Nighy), at their home in the coastal town of Seaford in East Sussex. We gather Jamie hasn’t been home for some time. His mother especially has been missing him and it seems to be on her behalf that Edward phones their son and persuades him to come for the weekend or, at least, an overnight stay, Saturday into Sunday. Edward has an ulterior motive. He’s going to tell Grace he’s leaving her and will then head off immediately. When he does so, he wants Jamie there.
In a stage play with this kind of homecoming set-up, we might expect the son to return to find his parents’ lives carrying on as usual until the father drops his bombshell. In Hope Gap Nicholson spends time describing Grace and Edward’s domestic routine and relationship before Jamie appears on the scene. In doing so, Nicholson not only anticipates Edward’s news but makes his interactions with Grace so tense and ill-tempered that it’s hard to believe their mutual dissatisfaction didn’t explode long before. There’s no suggestion of a superficially pleasant, making-the-best-of-it modus vivendi between the pair that keeps their shipwreck submerged. Instead, Grace seems irritated by everything her husband says and does; Edward speaks in a hushed, glum voice that suggests someone in mourning. Nicholson tries to conflate a capsule portrait of a moribund marriage with Edward’s bolt-from-the-blue announcement that he’s moving in with another woman. By illustrating the former so negatively, he makes it hard to believe Grace’s incredulity at the latter, along with her protestations that she still adores Edward and had no idea anything was wrong.
I watched the film on Curzon Home Cinema, whose introduction describes Nicholson’s story as ‘loosely based on the break-up of his own parents’ marriage’. This could be another part of the problem with Hope Gap. When writers put themselves into dramatic material, there’s a risk of both underwriting and overwriting their representative on stage or screen. Because the material is inherently meaningful to the writer, they can tend to overlook the need to characterise their alter ego while still using it as a mouthpiece for their own unmediated feelings. Both those things happen in Hope Gap and Josh O’Connor, good as he is, seems largely wasted in the role. Jamie, who starts coming back to Seaford much more frequently than before and gets embroiled in his mother’s outrage (and consequent outrageousness), is striking in his lack of agency. His tolerance of both parents’ behaviour seems a given rather than an expression of his personality. (It’s puzzling, for example, that he doesn’t get angry with his father for luring him home under false pretences that fateful weekend.) The scenes in London, where Jamie is friendly with a couple, Jess (Alysha Hart) and Dev (Ryan McKen), but has no love life of his own, are a makeweight. In contrast to all this, Jamie’s portentous closing voiceover, addressed to each of his parents (the ‘first man’ and ‘first woman’ in his world, and so on), sounds like someone else speaking – perhaps Nicholson. If you think of Hope Gap as veiled autobiography these words make a kind of sense. In the context of the film you’ve been watching, however, they‘re merely bizarre.
The third, and most surprising, problem is Annette Bening, who gives a rare uneasy performance. Nicholson’s eagerness to work with Bening is hardly surprising but this great actress proves to be miscast. In the Broadway production of The Retreat from Moscow, the Anglo-American partnership was reversed from how it is in the film: Eileen Atkins played the wife and John Lithgow the husband. I don’t know if Lithgow did an English accent but managing one with effort is at the heart of Bening’s discomfort. Perhaps it was necessary for Nicholson, if the character is essentially his own mother, for Grace to be home counties, middle-class English but it’s hard to think Bening wouldn’t have been much freer – and better – playing her as American. Her accent rarely sounds natural and occasionally slips but the issue here is more than technical: it seems to reflect an assumption that an Englishwoman with this background is bound to be ‘controlled’ to a degree an American equivalent wouldn’t be. Yet Grace is meant to be volatile and emotionally exuberant, even excessive – her husband’s temperamental polar opposite. It’s no coincidence that Bening’s best moments come when a scene can’t begin to work unless she lets herself go. For example, once her husband has left her, Grace acquires a dog. She calls him Edward and gets a somewhat perverse pleasure out of training him (‘Stay, Edward!’). The confusion between her commands to the canine namesake and to the man himself, in a showdown at the office of Edward’s solicitor (Steven Pacey), is grimly funny. More often, though, Annette Bening seems constrained.
Edward takes the view that he and Grace were never suited, that she’s always wanted him to be something he isn’t. A teacher at a local sixth-form college, he specialises in, as Nicholson’s play’s title acknowledges, Napoleonic history. (Although we see Edward at work in only one short scene, we never see him out of a collar and tie. The men’s wardrobe in the film is eyecatchingly limited: Jamie seems to have just the one shirt.) Like Bening, Bill Nighy is accomplished but seems wrong. His despairing sotto voce gets a bit boring except when it’s played for laughs. In a rare frivolous moment, Edward buys a Cornetto from an ice-cream seller on the sea front, then immediately laments that it cost £2. The film was shot on location in Seaford (its title refers to a location on a favourite family coastal walk) with some sequences in Yorkshire. The scenic outdoor settings, photographed by Anna Valdez Hanks, offer some relief to the miserable story, its prevailing tone reinforced by Alex Heffes’s spare, melancholy music.
William Nicholson was raised in a Roman Catholic family and Grace’s determined religious belief looks set to be a prominent theme. One of Nicholson’s strongest passages of writing is a dinner-table theodicy debate, shortly after Jamie’s arrival. He has stopped believing; Edward is a less practising Catholic than his wife, who goes to Mass alone the following morning. But even Grace’s faith turns out to be intermittent in the story: we don’t get a clear sense of how the overwhelming upset of Edward’s desertion affects it. Another well-written and well-played exchange comes near the end of the film and marks the sole appearance of Angela (Sally Rogers), whom Edward first got to know as the mother of one of his students, and with whom he’s now living. Grace, with what has come to seem typical disregard for niceties, walks into Angela’s home uninvited, to return to Edward his Napoleonic toy soldiers. He’s appalled and, when Angela appears and Grace asks why she thought she had a right to steal Edward, tries to deal with the situation. Angela calmly says she can speak for herself and does so. She thinks they were three unhappy people before; now only one of them is unhappy. Words uncharacteristically fail Grace and she exits. Sally Rogers’s straightforward, ordinary-looking Angela helps you believe Edward’s remark to Jamie that life with her is a relief after the one he’s had with Grace.
It seems likely that William Nicholson’s parents’ thirty-three-year marriage ended around 1980. The Retreat from Moscow was first produced, at Chichester, just before the millennium. Yet the action in Hope Gap appears to be taking place in the present day. Does this explain why the modern technology references feel awkward (save for a dolefully funny exchange of texts between Jamie and Dev, despite their sitting only a few feet apart at the time)? This is especially the case with Edward’s metaphors: he says ‘everything is contactless now’ and, regarding Wikipedia editing, that you can delete history with a single keystroke … At the start, Grace is putting together an anthology of favourite poems in a desultory way; at the film’s relatively upbeat end, this, with Jamie’s technical help and encouragement, has turned into a website: you enter a search word like ‘hope’ to summon up a suitable uplifting lyric.
In another way, the apparently present-day setting works for the piece. It’s currently almost impossible to watch a film supposedly happening now without thinking that the people on screen are standing too close together or should be washing their hands more. Like countless screen characters before her, Grace, from the very start, is socially isolated to an implausible extent – except that it doesn’t seem so implausible in lockdown times. Perhaps better to keep her incommunicado, in any case. One of the film’s most startling episodes occurs when Grace is trying to put together some kind of post-marital life and starts volunteering for a Samaritans-type outfit. She’s a dangerous liability there. She takes a call and instantly monopolises the conversation, railing bitterly about how terrible it is to be betrayed, and so on. Just what the potential suicide on the other end of the line needed to hear.
28 August 2020
