The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

 Everyman

Sam Lee is, I think, a genuinely important folk-singer. He learns his songs from traveller communities where they are still part of a living tradition and reworks them in a contemporary style which nevertheless honours his sources. I sometimes find his work challenging, but he sings with authenticity, sincerity and faith. Each year he does open air performances where he takes audiences on walks to remote locations where nightingales can still be heard, and improvises music with the birdsong. He describes these shows as "pilgrimages".

So, anyway. Jim Broadbent, playing Harold Fry, gets a letter from an old colleague who is terminally ill, and arbitrarily decides that he is going to walk the four hundred and ninety miles from his home to her hospice to say goodbye.

So he does.

That's it. That's the plot.

I am not going to commit to this being the worst film of 2023: we've already had the Whale and we have Barbie to look forward to and it's only May. But rarely have two such good actors worked so hard to extract some emotional sense out of such offensively slight material. Jim's wife is played by Penelope Wilton; she's the only other human being in the story who comes within four hundred a ninety miles of being a character. I kept wondering if the film would have been any different if Richard Briers had been available?

If I say "I don't want to insult you, but..." and then insult you I have, in fact, still insulted you. If I say "I know you don't want to be interrupted, but...." then I have, in fact, interrupted you. There is such a thing as witty self-deprecation. The front matter of David Eggers Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius includes, under "acknowledgments" "The author acknowledges that this book is kind of uneven." Nowadays we call it lamp-shading. The set up of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry movie is ludicrously hard to swallow. But putting the word "unlikely" on the posters does not make this OK. It's just even more annoying.

I pretty much gave up on the film after about twenty minutes. A few days into his walk, Harold has a brief encounter with a stranger in a station buffet. (Possibly played by Nick Sampson, but it's hard to distinguish "Kind Man" and "Dressing Gown Man" and "Silver Haired Man" on the cast list.) The stranger offers Harold half of his toasted tea cake which I must admit was a relief: I thought for one terrible moment that they were going to do the Douglas Adams "eating the stranger's biscuits by accident" skit. In fact, the stranger, out of the blue, tells Harold that he is a closeted gay man who has mildly kinky meetings with a sex-worker, and wants relationship advise. Having mentioned Douglas Adams, it occurs to me that the scene would have been improved no end if the words THIS NEVER HAPPENS had flashed across the screen. Who was it who wrote "No they didn't!" after every piece of action in To The Lighthouse?

I can only assume that the book, which has something of a following, was presented as some kind of non-realistic allegory. The end-credits suggest that we heard a choir singing He Who Would Valiant Be at some point, but if, like me, you missed that, Harold ends up wearing a red teeshirt with the word PILGRIM printed on it. It could be that if the characters he encountered on his journey had been more clearly presented as symbols, the whole thing would have been less agonising. As it is, we have a parade of "types" who talk like Hallmark condolence cards. When Harold's wife goes to he doctor because she thinks Harold has lost his mind, the doctor opines that "It's a beautiful thing he's doing." When Harold asks a lady in a farmhouse for some water, she says "A man should have a son, otherwise he is the last of his line." He is briefly joined on his walk by a young man of religious persuasion, who talks about "the lord" and says his prayers and makes me doubt if anyone involved has ever met an actual Christian. There's a nice possibly Ukrainian doctor who's working as a cleaner and washes. his. feet. Jesus, one is tempted to say H. Christ.

The film is possibly about faith, but it doesn't have anything interesting, or indeed anything at all, to say about it. Howard is pointedly non-religious; but thinks that at some level his walk might extend his friend's life. In the only interesting part of the film, he acquires a following of semi-hippy supporters who have been inspired by his story and kind of have faith in Harold. One slightly wishes he had ended up on a balcony with no clothes on shouting "You are all different!" In the closest thing the movie has to a plot development, it turns out that the person who inspired Harold to start his walk never really believed in it herself.

Prof. Richard Dawkins has said that a lot of religious folks don't so much believe in God as believe in belief: and in certain moods you can see what he means. But the film doesn't seem to be saying that religion is like going on a long walk which achieves nothing for no reason; or that stupid Mr Bunyan sent poor Mr Christian up against hobgoblins and foul fiends knowing perfectly well there was no celestial city for him to get do. Neither does it say that agnostic Mr Fry at some level found God on his journey. Some hospices are certainly run by religious orders, but it seems a little conspicuous that at the end of his journey Harold is greeted by a nun; and that there is a cross above his friend's bed. But the message seems to be (stop me if you've heard this before) that the real quest was the friends he made along the way. Faith -- not faith in anything, just faith per se -- seems to be good in itself.

Harold buys a cheap quartz pendant in Exeter cathedral: he hangs it in the window of his friend's hospice room. The quartz stone fills the room with little lights that look like stars. It's quite unusual for the BBFC certificate to spoil the movie, but having been told that the film is PG due to "suicide references" it wasn't a complete surprise when we found out what Bad Thing happened to Harold's son which drove a wedge between him and his wife. When little lights that look like stars start to flash around the gay man and the out of work doctor and all the other people Harold has touched on his journey I did wonder if the warnings about suicide and self harm may have been about the audience rather than the film. Speaking for myself, I was certainly thinking "just kill me now".

Or, if you are rather more clear headed, that the Vogon had never been born.

Harold treats the first section of the walk rather as if it were a holiday, staying in B&Bs and motels; but about a third of the way through, he sends his credit card, keys, and ID home and continues the walk with absolutely nothing. We see him taking his shirt off and washing himself, Lear-like, in a wild stream. And it is at this point that Sam Lee's exquisite Seeds of Love plays on the sound track. (I can't help thinking they'd originally intended to use his equally exquisite Spencer The Rover, about a man who, er, goes for a long walk and then comes home.) It's a powerful song, pagan in a good sense, which Sam's voice gives an unearthly tinge to. It was the first song that Cecil Sharp heard (from a gardener named, honestly, John England) and therefore has a claim to being the place the modern folk revival began. It is tempting to say that the songs are worth the price of admission; but you'd be better off downloading them from Bandcamp.

Thank No-One In Particular that it didn't occur to them to use the Proclaimers.


 

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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