averilburystedmunds: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Also labelled
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

To the cinema for a welcome respite from long and mainly empty days! I am in self-imposed purdah in an attempt to coax back my normal energy which went AWOL at the end of Easter after I managed to do in one week that which would normally take three weeks! Chiefly, it must be said, by happenstance and coincidence but also plus a lack of personal judgement I suppose. I had quite forgotten that there is an outside chance of the M.E. fatigue returning if I seriously overdo things. Obviously, now I remember!

Anyway the Abbeygate Cinema is perhaps a 2/3 minute stroll/stagger from where I live and it is one of my most admired buildings in Bury, it having a curved and authentic Art Deco frontage which warms the heart and lifts the eye each time I go past. Built in 1920 and over 100 years later, it is still effortlessly elegant and stylish. One of the many pluses to living here. I hadn’t immediately heard of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry but, after I decided A Treat was needed, I looked at the film list online and as it happens, I only needed to read that Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton were the leads for me to acquire a ticket. No further recommendation required!

I since happen to have read two reviews of ‘Harold’, one in Friday’s Times [28/04/2023] by Kevin Maher who judged the film, ‘superb’ and one in the New Statesman [28/04//4/05/2023] by David Sexton who decided it was ‘suitably plodding’.] So off this Sunday morning to view it for myself. Harold Fry is a man who has never, knowingly, left the sidelines of life, but who, en route to post a letter to a former colleague, Queenie, in response to hers bidding him farewell as she is dying from cancer, chats to a girl with blue hair in a garage shop who tells him, “If you have faith, you can do anything.” Untypically, Harold is inspired and decides, on the spot, to set off immediately from Kingsbridge, in Devon, to walk to Berwick-on-Tweed in the sudden firm belief that while he walks, Queenie will live, waiting for him to arrive. It is thus that he decides he is going to prolong her life.

Harold's long, cathartic walk

“I’ve spent my life not doing anything. And now, at last, I am.” One of the characters he meets briefly on his extraordinary walk, is a cancer surgeon who tells Harold bluntly that it is only medicine, not faith, that can cure cancer but Harold merely nods amiably and ignores the message. Here is a true pilgrim who believes.

During his 627 mile walk [this is a man who generally only walks to the car, as his wife forcefully points out] we learn of the many regrets and mistakes of his past 65 years while he trudges on meeting, by happenstance, a random cast of characters both kind and well-intentioned as well as damaged and dishonest. As he chats to strangers in cafes or coffee shops, innocently telling passers-by of his quest to help his old friend, Queenie, so his quiet confidences are unexpectedly spread and he becomes, mysteriously [to him], famous with a noisy growing group of disparate fellow travellers apparently wanting to support him, who deepen his understanding of others and, critically, of himself, but who also slow him down and with whom he does not travel in comfort.

Some of the unlikely fellow travellers Harold attracts

Harold Fry and wife Maureen, the unlikely
survivors of an arid marriage

Harold deciding not to post the letter
but to walk

Pilgrimage is the perfect word for Harold’s odyssey; he is hoping for personal salvation, without consciously realising that, and he is subconsciously seeking a miracle as recompense for Queenie whom he wronged by default many years ago. He neglects to inform Maureen, his wife, of his suddenly-intended, epic journey, [he had just popped out to post a letter]; their sterile, frigid relationship, effectively ended 25 years before when their only son, gifted but disturbed, hung himself, and here portrayed in simple relentless dialogue. Maureen tells him in one phone call, “I hardly notice you’re gone.” To a supportive neighbour, she says, “It would be easier if he were dead; at least, I’d know where I stand.” Maureen is repressed and cannot tolerate uncertainty but barely registers the austerity and emotional indifference of the Fry everyday life. Its sheer barren predictability is of comfort to her. This wasteland is beautifully conveyed through her endless, unnecessary vacuuming and polishing of already immaculate surfaces plus the sight of the net curtains blowing in profusion to ensure privacy, and the white walls of their home, bare of any paintings or photos.

Jim Broadbent as Harold Fry.
Perhaps his finest performance.

Both Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton are, as ever, superb. Broadbent is wretchedly sad as Harold, increasingly depressed as he looks over his past life and yet mutely resilient in an unknowing, poignant way. He doesn’t exactly blunder through life but he does continue, in the face of insuperable odds, to keep on, keeping on, as Alan Bennett might say. His face becomes more weathered, more lined, more bearded and be-whiskered as he journeys on and his gradual realisation of things not said, or done, in the past, is slyly portrayed in a way that suggests this could ultimately be, a story of redemption. Penelope Wilton as Maureen is repressed and repressive, never forgiving Harold for past errors, resigned to her grief over her son David and for Harold’s shortcomings in that relationship. The ending with the pair speaking honestly about the past and their conflicted remorse, suggests the dignity and endurance that old age can possess ….. and the regret.