Steve Whitaker, Literary Editor

Film: The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry

That The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’s counter-intuitive odyssey has attracted critical opprobrium on grounds of testing the audience’s credulity seems slight and myopic. For Hettie Macdonald’s eloquent, and affecting meditation on loss, elegy and redemption heads off any suggestion of implausibility at the pass: Jim Broadbent’s portrayal of unresolved guilt and grief finds an outlet in a journey that is very necessary and to some degree compelled. And as he sheds all of the trappings of his domestic universe en route – credit cards and cash alongside a sense of quotidian purpose – we become increasingly persuaded by Harold’s story in direct proportion to the rolling away of the miles of his trudge between Devon and Berwick-Upon-Tweed.

And we are well-served by the simplicity of the narrative conceit: Macdonald’ slow-burning, introspective direction, overseen by Rachel Joyce, who wrote the book on which the film is based, dissolves the question of credibility in waves of emotional gravitas. There is little need for complexity here. Harold Fry, husband to Maureen, played with persuasively irritating anxiety by Penelope Wilton, enjoys an unlikely epiphany in a petrol station in Kingsbridge on the basis that the contents of the letter he is about to post to a terminally ill former work colleague would better be delivered in person. What we don’t learn until the truth is revealed in subsequent flashback, is that Queenie (Angela Bassett) took the blame for Harold when his life imploded and he proceeded to wreck the brewery in which they both worked several decades earlier. He owes her a debt which he is impelled to repay before it is too late.

Not least because she is a party to his anguish: for the other, more resonant, side of the story is of his son (Earl Cave), delivered in exquisite, profoundly affecting retrospect as we see the illness and consequent drug-addling of the Cambridge-bound David finally succumbing to his own demons. In this sense only, the dying colleague has forged an emotional connection with Harold to which his wife can no longer approximate; riven by the memory of David’s death, and their mutual failure to prevent it, the two are unable to recognise the secure landscape that obtained before the breakdown of son and marriage. They limp along in barely concealed bitterness, beautifully realised in the stifled playing of Wilton and Broadbent.

The religious intonation is deliberate. Harold’s ‘pilgrimage’ is marked at various stages by figures who give succour in fatigue and near-despair: the unwitting savant in the petrol station who becomes his touchstone, the East European former doctor, played with moving simplicity by Monika Gossmann, who tends to his torn feet, the farmer’s wife (Claire Rushbrook) who offers wise counsel, and the young addict who becomes Harold’s ‘acolyte’ (Daniel Frogson) in the desperate belief that his pilgrimage is to find the saviour. All add to a narrative of redemption and partial reconciliation and all are backdrops in an astonishingly changeable landscape whose eclectic beauty is captured prismatically by the camera. The assorted tribe of new-age travellers who posse behind Harold in the northern reaches of his journey are both unconvincing and surplus to aesthetic requirements, yielding a rare missed step in a very English film of stoicism and self-abnegation.

But this is an absorbing, very engaging story and highly receptive to the demands of filmic treatment. The film’s denouement at a café in Berwick – where the now near-vagrant Harold is initially turned away – is heartbreaking, as spiritually prescient as the chiaroscuro flickering of light and shadow in Queenie’s bedroom in Berwick, and illuminating the sky between clouds on the traveller's journey.


Director : Hettie Macdonald

Featuring Jim Broadbent, Penelope Wilton, Monika Gossmann, Claire Rushbrook, Angela Bassett
Cert : 12A

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is on general release at cinemas.