![]() It helps that Harold’s many encounters as he walks the length of the country are more disturbing than they are cute or coddling – the film makes a definite effort to show us modern Britain, warts and all, rather than some Richard Curtis fantasyland. Director Hettie Macdonald made her debut with Beautiful Thing (1996), the warmly remembered tale of two boys coming out on a council estate she has a careful way with her actors, even in walk-on roles. ![]() The film faces similar hurdles, and makes a decent fist of not collapsing into mush. Even the most fulsome reviews acknowledged the risk of tweeness in this Bunyanesque yarn, which Joyce largely dodged through her unfussy prose style. Such was the premise of Rachel Joyce’s 2012 novel, a Booker-longlisted reading-club favourite she expanded from a short radio play. ![]() Spontaneously, he decides on a much grander gesture, and simply begins to walk north, on a 500-mile journey he’s going to undertake wearing boat shoes. Harold tries to compose some feeble words of reply – “Say something you mean!”, chirrups his testy wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton) – but something in him resists posting the note. An old friend and former colleague called Queenie (Linda Bassett) has cancer, and is writing from a hospice bed to say goodbye. ![]() Harold Fry (a never-more-himself Jim Broadbent) has lacked purpose in his South Devon retirement, until the day a letter arrives over breakfast, postmarked from Berwick-upon-Tweed. ![]()
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