Despite being impeccably acted, sincerely intended and often beautifully shot, there is something basically unsatisfying in this quirky/sad movie, adapted by Rachel Joyce from her own Booker-longlisted novel; it is undermined by issues of tone and plausibility connected with that word “unlikely” in the title. The film presents partly as a sentimental oldie heartwarmer, but also asks us to believe in it as something more serious and even tragic: an emotional investment made harder by the unreality of what we’re seeing.
Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton play Harold and Maureen, a retired couple living a life of quiet boredom and desperation in Devon. Out of the blue, Harold gets a letter saying that an old work colleague of his is now in a cancer hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. This is Queenie, played all-too-briefly in flashback by Linda Bassett, and Maureen looks far from pleased to hear her name.
Harold writes her a stiffly uncommunicative letter of sympathy and wanders out to post it, nigglingly aware of how unsatisfactory his letter is; he decides that he has missed the collection time at his local post box, goes to find another post box, then another and then before he knows it – and inspired by a chance anecdote he hears from a young woman in a petrol station – Harold has conceived a desire to go on a full-on Forrest Gump quest. He will walk from Devon to Berwick to deliver his letter to Queenie by hand, having revelatory one-on-one encounters on the way, and temporarily amassing a crowd of excitable followers (more Life of Brian than Gump, maybe). Meanwhile poor Maureen climbs the walls with frustration and worry at home, left alone to face the elephant in the living room that they don’t talk about.
But what is he running away from? What is it all really about? The film gives us two big reveals: the secret heartbreak that Harold and Maureen share and the subsequent specific situation with Queenie. The first revelation is certainly very shocking, if sketched in very cursorily, and we actually hear little or nothing about what Queenie is really like.
But then there is Harold himself. We are asked to believe that he can walk all that way without proper boots or weatherproof kit or indeed any kind of map, and with just a quick patch-up from a sympathetic doctor at the start of his journey. And not just that: after a while he posts his keys, money and debit cards back to Maureen, so he doesn’t even get to stay at B&Bs: sleeping rough, eating wild blackberries and accepting charity (although those followers do get free pizzas and tents for a while). It’s a solemn, self-conscious fantasy.
• The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is released on 28 April in UK and Irish cinemas.
