The Unlike­ly Pil­grim­age of Harold Fry

Now 73, Jim Broad­bent has trad­ed for decades in a sub­tle mode of act­ing that means he dis­ap­pears into char­ac­ters. Unlike movie stars whose per­sonas remain con­sis­tent across every pic­ture they illu­mi­nate, Broad­bent is an enig­ma. We do not know what he will do next. We only know that he will do it with integrity.

Harold Fry is a char­ac­ter whose emo­tion­al broad­ness would, in the wrong hands, make him a car­toon char­ac­ter, pump­ing his ham­my fists at the heav­ens. Broad­bent, how­ev­er, opts for unsen­ti­men­tal expres­sive choic­es, and so teth­ers swollen motives to the ground. He has the intel­li­gence to pull against the mate­r­i­al, secure in the knowl­edge that love, grief and an inabil­i­ty to for­give one­self are embed­ded in the mate­r­i­al and will seep out in tiny, heartrend­ing doses.

That mate­r­i­al is Rachel Joyce’s epony­mous best-sell­ing 2012 nov­el about a retired man liv­ing in Devon with his wife Mau­reen (Pene­lope Wilton) who receives word that an old friend, Quee­nie (Lin­da Bas­sett), is dying in a hos­pice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He goes to post Quee­nie a let­ter, how­ev­er a chance con­ver­sa­tion with a blue-haired ser­vice sta­tion cashier (Nina Singh) prompts him to bridge over 500 miles of dis­tance by walk­ing there instead.

Along the way, he must reck­on with the furi­ous incom­pre­hen­sion of Mau­reen, the trau­mat­ic mem­o­ries of what befell their son David (Earl Cave) and the ques­tion of why Quee­nie became embroiled in events. This back­sto­ry is par­celled out in flash­backs that bear out the med­i­ta­tive truth that only in silence can we make sense of our lives.

In the here and now, Harold – like Blanche DuBois – relies upon the kind­ness of strangers. Sin­gle-serv­ing char­ac­ters across the length of the coun­try feed and take him in; an East­ern Euro­pean doc­tor tends to his bat­tered feet. As he walks, this pre­vi­ous­ly glazed man takes on a beatif­ic light­ness, and the sim­ple nature of his quest draws fol­low­ers who hope to find answers to their own sor­rows by join­ing this scrag­gly south coast Jesus.

It is a tremen­dous­ly mov­ing con­cept, pow­ered by a deep belief in our human desire to help each oth­er to make progress. Where it floun­ders is in the lack of visu­al imag­i­na­tion and sup­port­ing-char­ac­ter tex­ture. In the lit­er­ary con­text, dis­tinc­tive flour­ish­es sing, where­as in this trans­la­tion to the screen both the peo­ple and the places that Harold encoun­ters seem two dimensional.

Match­ing him in every dimen­sion is Pene­lope Wilton whose Mar­garet has the unex­cit­ing job of work­ing through her feel­ings while – sud­den­ly –home alone, cook­ing soup and look­ing bale­ful­ly at the phone. Above all else, this is a show­case for two phe­nom­e­nal actors whose rela­tion­ship holds both decades of recrim­i­na­tions and pock­ets of love. The sub­text behind the pil­grim­age is that an act of kind­ness from decades ago can stay with a per­son and com­pel them to shake off the shack­les of shame. The Unlike­ly Pil­grim­age of Harold Fry is about the lengths that even skep­ti­cal peo­ple will go to for each oth­er, a length that defies all logic.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, month­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.