Hope Gap sees Annette Bening and Bill Nighy star on this chilly depiction of divorce by the seaside
“Marriages only work because both people want them to work”
Sometimes it’s laborious to disguise your staginess. It’s true of many a theatre blogger and in addition of movies which have been tailored from performs. William Nicholson’s 2019 Hope Gap is a cinematic model of his 1999 play The Retreat from Moscow and has had little drawback attracting some severe performing expertise. It debuted in Chichester with Edward Hardwicke, Daniel Betts and Dame Janet Suzman and on Broadway with John Lithgow Ben Chaplin and Dame Eileen Atkins however regardless of the presence of Annette Bening, Bill Nighy and Josh O’Connor right here, it doesn’t fairly pulse with sufficient life.
Edward and Grace have been married for almost 30 years in what at first looks as if companionable irascibility however when he invitations their son Jamie to their residence on the Sussex coast for the weekend, he reveals that he’s fallen in love with another person and is leaving her. Thus we comply with the fallout primarily via Jamie’s eyes, as he hopelessly tries to mediate between the befuddled hush of his well-intentioned however undoubtedly cowardly father and the nuclear rage of his shell-shocked and seething mom. And for higher or worse, there actually isn’t way more to it than that.
Without a lot narrative propulsion, there’s a definite concentrate on the performing and within the fingers of Bening, Nighy and O’Connor, there’s definitely some wonderful work right here. Nighy mines his customary well-worn rumpledness, Bening is all sharp edges because the wounded Grace and O’Connor’s quiet emotion proves fairly stirring. But on the identical time, there’s an actual froideur to the movie, a coldness that retains us at arm’s size. Amping up the intellectualism of the leads performs into this, the script’s literary pretensions weighing closely, and so there’s little emotional engagement on supply. Anna Valdez-Hanks’ cinematography is spectacular although.