BRIAN VINER on film: The man who walked the length of England – just to deliver a letter
The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry (12A, 108 minutes)
Rating:
Verdict: A road worth travelling
Polite Society (12A, 103 minutes)
Rating:
Verdict: Over-zany
Even if Jim Broadbent hadn’t voiced the audio version of Rachel Joyce’s 2012 debut novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry, it would be hard to imagine anyone else playing the title character on screen.
He is a perfect fit for the ordinary provincial Englishman who does a rather extraordinary thing, just as he was in his last leading role, in The Duke (2022).
Jim Broadbent (left) is a perfect fit for the ordinary provincial Englishman who does a rather extraordinary thing
Many of those who loved the book will doubtless disagree but I prefer the film, also written by Joyce
Many of those who loved the book will doubtless disagree but I prefer the film, also written by Joyce. She was an actress and writer of radio plays long before she tried her hand at novels, and those sensibilities show.
It’s a very well-crafted adaptation of a story that on the page struck me as mildly mawkish, but on screen is propelled so expertly by Broadbent and the marvellous Penelope Wilton that the mawkishness rarely surfaces; and even when it does, hardly matters.
Director Hettie Macdonald, whose credits are mostly in TV (Poirot, Doctor Who, Howards End and Normal People), also does a splendid job, keeping the show on the road in more ways than one.
At the screening I went to, Broadbent popped up beforehand to wish us an enjoyable experience, hoping that we would find it a ‘celebration of humanity’. Happily, I did.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry is a calculatedly poignant picture but sweet rather than saccharine, drawing from that same deep well of English spirit and eccentricity that made a TV hit decades ago of The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin; and more recently made Captain Tom Moore a household name when, aged 99, he started walking lengths of his garden to raise money for NHS charities. The story begins with Harold (Broadbent), who lives in suburban Devon, unexpectedly receiving a letter postmarked Berwick-upon-Tweed.
It turns out to be from Queenie Hennessy, a former colleague at the brewery he once worked for, letting him know that she is in a hospice up there, dying.
It’s a very well-crafted adaptation of a story that on the page struck me as mildly mawkish, but on screen is propelled expertly by Broadbent
Taken aback, Harold writes a stilted reply entirely in keeping with his somewhat stilted personality. Then off he goes to post the letter. But every time he gets to a postbox, he decides to walk on to the next.
After all, it’s a nice day — so nice that his gloomy, uptight wife Maureen (Wilton) has already suggested to him that he might ‘get out the patio chairs’.
In that alternative universe where dear old Captain Tom stayed indoors and unknown with a rug over his lap, Harold eventually posts the letter and walks home. But not in this universe, which is governed by laws of quirky, doughty Englishness.
At a garage, Harold is served by a young woman who remarks that with sufficient belief, miracles can happen.
So his small mission to post the letter becomes a big one: he will walk all the way to Berwick, more than 470 miles, and for as long as he is walking, he tells himself, Queenie will keep living.
It is indeed a pilgrimage, spiritual rather than religious. However, the key word in the title is ‘unlikely’.
This sort of behaviour is wildly out of character for Harold, yet as we learn in a series of flashbacks, it is still informed by his life so far; specifically, by his dullness and his failings as a father and, where Queenie is concerned, as a colleague.
He hasn’t been too successful as a husband, either, certainly if Maureen’s general air of disappointment is anything to go by.
But what emerges as he continues to walk almost the length of England, leaving her behind in a stew of resentment, is a touching portrait of a marriage that may not be beyond help. Harold needs material help, too, which is supplied along the way by the kindness of strangers.
Inevitably, in this day and age, he also becomes a Captain Tom-style media sensation, which for a while turns his one-man mission into a travelling jamboree as admirers flock to join him.
But it is still a thoroughly personal journey through England, a journey of redemption and self-knowledge and horrible blisters. I liked it far more than I expected.
Polite Society depicts a very different England, where two Anglo-Pakistani sisters living with their traditional Muslim parents in London fall out after the older of the two, Lena (Ritu Arya), becomes engaged to a dishy doctor in thrall to his fierce mother (Nimra Bucha).
Polite Society depicts a very different England, where two Anglo-Pakistani sisters living with their traditional Muslim parents in London fall out
Ria is an aspiring stuntwoman, so martial arts loom large as Manzoor attempts, with only sporadic success, to mix slapstick violence and Muslim-family comedy
Her younger sister Ria (newcomer Priya Kansara) is appalled. She thinks Lena is betraying her artistic promise and generally throwing her life away, so she mischievously sets out, with a pair of loyal schoolfriends, to find evidence that the doctor is unsuitable.
That’s pretty much the whole plot, but hardly hints at the craziness of the film, by writer-director Nida Manzoor (who created the Channel 4 sitcom We Are Lady Parts, and here makes her feature debut).
Ria is an aspiring stuntwoman, so martial arts loom large as Manzoor attempts, with only sporadic success, to mix slapstick violence and Muslim-family comedy with an outlandish genetics sub-plot that might have been lifted from a 1950s B-movie.
It overdoses on zaniness at times, but can’t be faulted for jollity and originality.
Gloves never quite come off in portrait of George Foreman
George Foreman was a mighty and destructive world heavyweight champion, who claims not to mind the irony that in boxing terms he is much more readily associated with defeat than victory, having lost the 1974 Rumble In The Jungle to Muhammad Ali.
Maybe that’s why he tries to guard other aspects of his legacy, calling all five of his sons George, for instance; and now endorsing a biopic, Big George Foreman (12A, 129 mins, **), on which he is credited as executive producer.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it is a blatant exercise in hagiography, glossing over all but two of Foreman’s five marriages
If you do know something of his story then you’ll see it for what it is: disappointingly humdrum and shallow
Perhaps not surprisingly, it is a blatant exercise in hagiography, glossing over all but two of Foreman’s five marriages and only fleetingly showing us what a nasty piece of work he was as a thieving, delinquent teenager.
His later embrace of Christianity, by contrast, gets the full works.
Nevertheless, it’s a heck of a tale and if you don’t know how he rose from poverty in Texas to become a champion boxer and later a preacher, not to mention a famously genial grill salesman, this film might be worth catching.
If you do know something of his story then you’ll see it for what it is: disappointingly humdrum and shallow.
Another famous African-American is celebrated in Little Richard: I Am Everything (15, 101 mins, ****), which explores the rock ’n’ roll icon’s sexuality and his remarkable, enduring influence.
Mick Jagger and Tom Jones pay tribute, there are some fabulous clips, and we hear John Lennon recalling how much it meant to The Beatles to meet him in Liverpool in 1962. They were, he says, ‘almost paralysed with adoration’.
So are some of those lauding the subject of Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition (PG, 90 mins, ****), which explains to all those of us unable to visit the current retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam why Johannes Vermeer was unsurpassed as an artist.
Never mind his martyrs and saints, or even his Girl With A Pearl Earring, his 17th-century street scenes, close up, are incredible. A treat.
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