Hope Gap

In Hope Gap, Grace (Annette Ben­ing) loves the writ­ten word. It’s an infec­tious love which she’s passed on to her hus­band, Edward (Bill Nighy) and son Jamie (Josh O’Connor) through repeat­ed recitation.

She’s tak­en poet­ry to heart, and she’s work­ing on an anthol­o­gy enti­tled ​‘I Have Been Here Before’, the first line of ​‘Sud­den Light’ by Dante Gabriel Ros­set­ti. The idea is to read a poem in the sec­tion relat­ed to how you’re feel­ing – hope, regret, grief. Hope Gap is a film which strives to encom­pass a range of emo­tions where it might have ben­e­fit­ed from pick­ing one to focus on.

We’ve been here before. On the sur­face, William Nicholson’s film is anoth­er divorce melo­dra­ma where­in two esteemed actors are giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to shout at each oth­er for two hours. If not Oscar-bait, à la Noah Baumbach’s Mar­riage Sto­ry, then BAF­TA-bait, à la Bening’s last British film role in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liv­er­pool.

Hope Gap doesn’t go as deep into ques­tions of love and loss as Nicholson’s 1993 screen­play for the CS Lewis biopic Shad­ow­lands, but it ben­e­fits from the focus on an adult son, for whom the end of his par­ents’ mar­riage is shown to be just as hard to accept as it would be for a young child. His fad­ing mem­o­ries of coastal walks, swing­ing between mum­my and dad­dy, are utter­ly heartbreaking.

It’s unfor­tu­nate that Nichol­son doesn’t com­mit to Jamie’s per­spec­tive. By try­ing to jug­gle his angle with that of Grace the film often feels con­fused and rais­es the ques­tion as to why we’re not giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to empathise with Edward, whom Nighy plays with enig­mat­ic wood­en­ness. This is O’Connor’s film, a more emo­tion­al­ly open per­for­mance than he gave in Fran­cis Lee’s God’s Own Coun­try, espe­cial­ly a mono­logue on fac­ing the road ahead on the cliffs of Seaford. He is fast becom­ing the face of endear­ing rur­al rugged­ness in British cinema.

Despite Bening’s recent British inva­sion, it turns out she’s not very good at the accent. It stymies her deliv­ery, mak­ing the fair­ly func­tion­al dia­logue thud with­out her usu­al emo­tive capa­bil­i­ties. She’s bet­ter when she com­mu­ni­cates through ges­ture, shin­ing in ten­der moments of sub­tle­ty such as fid­dling with her pop­py at a remem­brance ser­vice and attend­ing mass alone. They’re beau­ti­ful­ly shot by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Anna Valdez-Han­ks, whose cam­era sweeps with the wind by the sea­side and cap­tures the char­ac­ters’ pre­vi­ous lives in painter­ly track­ing shots of pho­tos around the house.

The ​‘Kyrie Elei­son’ is heard sev­er­al times on the sound­track, a plea for mer­cy which Grace describes as being almost hyp­not­ic. She doesn’t get any, clos­ing the film on a fair­ly pes­simistic note. With her hus­band gone and her son back at work, she’s left with the writ­ten words she loves so much. They’re beau­ti­ful, as is Hope Gap, but we’re left won­der­ing how much sub­stance lies behind them.