Inspirational memoirs of trauma overcome have long been attractive to film-makers. Saoirse Ronan, as producer and star, recently brought Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, an addiction story, to the big screen with some success. Kristen Stewart, making her directorial debut, just premiered a take on Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, involving multiple personal ordeals, at Un Certain Regard in Cannes. Now Marianne Elliott, a respected theatre director, propels Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs across the English west country in an attractive, if insufficiently varied, translation of a popular 2018 book by Raynor Winn.
It matters that such films are drawn from real life. Nobody would construct a fictional narrative with so few dramatic swerves from a pleasant, plodding course. Indeed, most of the greatest sadnesses have here occurred before the core narrative begins. Winn and her husband, Moth, stumbled into a wall of trouble deep into middle age. A substantial investment went badly wrong and, sued by the friend who had drawn them into the scheme, they found themselves homeless and close to broke. At around the same time, Moth was diagnosed with a rare neurodegenerative disease called corticobasal degeneration.
The film is not wholly successful in explaining why their next move was to walk all 1,000km of the South West Coastal Path. True, the tented life is one way of putting a roof over unhoused heads, but there are surely solutions that involve a deal fewer blisters. Then again, this is just the sort of thing the protagonists of inspirational memoirs do. Think of Reece Witherspoon in Wild (on the Pacific Crest Trail) or Mia Wasikowska in Tracks (crossing half of Australia). We need someone else to gain wisdom through walking so that we don’t have to. Just accept it.
The adventures here are less deadly and dramatic than those other films. There are no killer spiders or rampaging bears in Devon. We didn’t see Reece or Mia stopping for a cream tea on their opening legs. The audience can feel Moth’s (literal) pain, but The Salt Path is always at home to a school of gentle English humour. Early on, another hiker puzzlingly refers to our hero as “Simon”. Later, a party of well-heeled passersby take to the couple with baffling enthusiasm, invite them home for drinks and make puzzling mention of poetry. It transpires that Simon Armitage, the UK’s poet laureate, who bears faint resemblance to Moth, has attracted press attention for his own tramp along the path. Our heroes abandon the luxurious interlude with a hearty laugh.
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Such a project stands or falls on casting, and the film-makers have done well in picking Anderson and Isaacs for their leads. The former has always been at her best when inveigling a strain of steel into her character (or iron in the case of her Margaret Thatcher, from The Crown). Isaacs is a master of gruff no-nonsense, and he needs plenty of that as he struggles with fading limbs on the trek across sun- and rain-blasted lands. Hermione Norris provides strong support as a friend who, in flashback, offers highly qualified support following their financial meltdown. This is a very English class of self-discovery. Nobody spouts sentimental psychobabble or motivational gobbledegook. There is a sense that Raynor and Moth are here to do a job and that, despite occasional slips into mutual recrimination, they will do it if it kills them (which, in his case, it might).
One does yearn for a little more narrative juice. Hélène Louvart’s cinematography is lovely. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation provides some salty dialogue. But The Salt Path is as committed to travelling unyieldingly in one direction as are its compelling characters. There are worse things.
In cinemas from Friday, May 30th
