Steve Whitaker, Features Writer
Film Review: The Salt Path
For those unfamiliar with Winn’s story, the book, and film’s, central conceit is harrowingly simple: finding themselves homeless owing to a disastrous investment and betrayal of trust by a ‘friend’, Raynor and her husband, ‘Moth’, take to the South West coastal path and depart on a camping odyssey around the peninsula, as a knee-jerk yet constructive alternative to despair. Not knowing how they will endure – the couple’s savings have disappeared along with their cottage, and Moth suffers from a terminal neurodegenerative condition known as CBD – Raynor and Moth set off from Minehead in a rickety, middle-aged blaze of fearful exhilaration. The book that followed recounts the process of grief, of pain, of resolution and catharsis that accompanied the long journey.
The film more or less takes up the story in Somerset and, aside from several backward glances threading the narrative with retrospective detail, clings, in places vertiginously, to the coastal path throughout the achingly slow journey to Land’s End, whilst sticking, in faithful linear fashion, to real topographical markers. One of the unsung stars of the show, the cinematography is a stupendous accompaniment to the slow-burn of the unfolding plot, and Hélène Louvart deserves much credit for her realisation, with sterling use of drone footage, of a precipitous coastline, from the secluded Porlock Harbour, to the isolate, afforested Culbone, to a gorgeous overview of Ilfracombe and a dramatic rendering of the Arthurian steeps around Tintagel.
Comparisons with The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry are inevitable here, though Harold’s own pilgrimage is suffused with redemptive symbolism at various stages on the road to Berwick. The Salt Path is an altogether steadier measure, where pain emerges in poignant irruption, being mostly internalised and swallowed, especially in Gillian Anderson’s contained portrayal of Raynor. Anderson and Winn have met, and the ‘steeliness’ that the former observed in the latter is worked to extraordinary effect in the actor’s performance, which combines reserve with the subtle facial suggestion of ongoing grief. Jason Isaacs wears Moth’s almost overwhelming arthritic pain with heartbreaking conviction as he drags himself up narrow paths and, at one point, having deliberately discarded his medication, collapses into a fevered withdrawal to be comforted, again with profoundly affecting conviction, by Anderson.
For The Salt Path is a story of love and fortitude in adversity as the couple struggle to make sense of the future as it is viewed through the prism of the past and present. Their relationship with the present plays out in vignettes that are both refreshing and illuminating; Raynor and Moth face obstreperous strollers, wary passers-by and snide comments on their journey. But most, they are treated with kindness by strangers, and if those expressions of kindness are sometimes tempered by cliché, as they were in Harold Fry, they act as a kind of moral corrective in a universe of disinterest. The parting words of a passing walker, who offers them some recently collected blackberries, salted by the sea air, are repeated, as the walker describes the natural bounty as a ‘gift’. And if an ecological lesson is ingested at point of lush consumption, then it is reinforced tenfold as Anderson and Isaacs’ voyage of self-discovery is wildly enacted amongst the freedom of the waves, or in dining, like George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men, off the ‘fat of the lan’.
Elliott’s direction is at its very best at such moments, encouraging a wider sense of coming to terms in the redemptive flow of the natural world. Even as potential disaster strikes as the sea envelops their tent, Moth’s ironic plea of ownership – ‘the tent is our home!’ – is overlain with the gravitas of distress in Isaacs’ desperate, and desperately moving, reading.
Which is not to say that Salt Path is devoid of humour, not least of the sardonic sort that naturally inheres to stoical resignation. The coterminous presence of the poet Simon Armitage on the South West Coastal Path, his prelude to the meditative journal that became Walking Away, adds a useful counterpoint to the film’s narrative. Mistaken for Armitage by some of those who have learned of the poet’s ‘troubadour’ journey, Moth, and Winn, are wined and dined in an unknowing charade. If the scene in which Moth performs excerpts from Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Beowulf to a St Ives audience for cash is the recreation of an actual busk, then Isaacs’ rendering is a pitch-perfect exercise in uplifting, crowd-pleasing comedy.
There are inconsistencies here – Moth’s unawareness of Armitage is highly unlikely in a Heaney devotee – but the film does not dwell excessively on detail, rather on the backwash of crisis, emotion and consequence. The large cast are satellite to the focus of Anderson and Isaacs - bringers of incidental wisdom, nuance, or of trauma that evolves towards resolution. Chris Roe’s soundscape – a compelling string-driven admixture of drama, anxiety and uplift – is an emotional evisceration, a swathing dissection of turbulence, love and endurance.
Director: Marianne Elliott
Cinematography: Hélène Louvart
Composer: Chris Roe
The Salt Path is on general release.