the unlikely pilgrimage of harold fry book review

With a conversation, direct and to the point. And when the film ends, it is, pleasingly, just as it starts. Broadbent and Wilton embody a loving flexibility that surprises them both.

The film doesn’t handle these flashbacks as well as the book, leaving the son a little too thinly drawn.īut still, the concept of finding solace in helping others feels tremendously moving. He and Maureen had a son, a brilliant, troubled young man, to whom something happened. Harold and Maureen’s relationship is deeply strained (Photo: eOne)Īs Harold walks, plastering blisters, meeting kind strangers, embracing a simple life of washing in streams and foraging for food, his mind harks back. Such terrific acting, with longing and desperation in every glance. She is at once indifferent, outraged, devastated. “If you have faith, you can do anything,” she says, prompting him to set off immediately, on foot, from Devon to Berwick, alerting Queenie to his journey and asking her not to die before he gets there. Harold goes to post a reply to the letter but encounters a young woman at the garage who tells him to have faith. Maureen makes it clear she doesn’t care and gets on with her obsessive hoovering. Harold is unsure how to reply to Queenie, whose importance in his life we don’t yet know. Harold and Maureen’s relationship is deeply strained, but why? It seems to be more than the apathy of a tepid marriage. The script, written by Joyce herself, is sparse, relying on its actors to do the heavy lifting.

This is not a drama about Britishness but a story specific to Harold and Maureen. It’s to this one’s credit that it chooses instead to be narratively direct. So many of these films begin with a wishy-washy landscape shot or a cycle through an idyllic village – scene-setting rather than character-building. Based on the bestselling book by Rachel Joyce, the film begins abruptly in Fry’s kitchen, as a letter arrives from his old friend Queenie, who is dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed and is writing to say goodbye.

Here the stalwarts are Jim Broadbent as the eponymous Harold and Penelope Wilton as Maureen, his wife. And there is usually Judi Dench or Maggie Smith or Bill Nighy or some other British stalwart with a twinkle in their eye. There is always a misplaced sense of decency that gets people in trouble. There is always a hapless chap being eccentrically British, unsure of how to say what he means. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry belongs to a particularly British genre of film that one might describe as Notting Hill for the boomer generation.

The unlikely pilgrimage of harold fry book review