The Ballad Of Wallis Island (12A, 139 mins)
Verdict: Hilarious and poignant
A pair of films open in cinemas today, each as British as a cream tea and both set way out west, yet strikingly different in tone. One is a hoot and the other anything but.
The former is The Ballad Of Wallis Island. Written by and starring Tim Key and Tom Basden, it wrings laughs galore from the fundamentally sad story of Charles (Key), who lives alone and lonely in a rambling house on an island off the Pembrokeshire coast, with only occasional social interaction at the local shop, run by single mum Amanda (Sian Clifford).
But Charles does have plenty of money, enough of it to pay a somewhat brittle, moderately well-known singer-songwriter called Herb McGwyer (Basden) to travel out to the island to perform a private gig.
Charles claims they’ve met once before, long ago at the Colchester Corn Exchange, when Herb and his then-girlfriend Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) were a duo known as McGwyer Mortimer – ‘the best-selling folk-rock artists of 2014’, no less.
What Herb doesn’t know is that Charles has also invited Nell to the island. He is willing to fork out £800,000 in cash for the pair to re-form for one night only, without knowing that they are both bringing a heap of emotional baggage from their broken relationship.
Written by and starring Tim Key and Tom Basden, it wrings laughs galore from the fundamentally sad story of Charles (Key, pictured)
Carey Mulligan as Nell Mortimer and Akemnji Ndifornyen as Michael in The Ballad Of Wallis Island
To complicate matters further, Nell is coming with her husband, Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen). Herb hasn’t seen her for nine years. He didn’t even know she was married.
The story begins with Herb arriving by boat and an over-excited Charles wading out to meet him.
Gauche, over-eager and exasperating, with a nervy compulsion for puns and word-play, Charles is a character in the great British tradition of Alan Partridge and David Brent, only more lovable and vulnerable.
‘He’s sort of sweet in a way,’ Herb tells his agent over the phone, while also using a football expression to complain that Charles won’t leave him alone. ‘He’s everywhere. It’s like he’s man-marking me.’
Charles has two framed lottery tickets on his wall. Herb had assumed that he must have made his riches from finance or oil but in fact he was a male nurse who miraculously scooped the jackpot twice.
Having used it all up first time round travelling the world with the love of his life, Marie, he then went and won it again.
Alas, he no longer has Marie to share his fortune with, although for reasons that eventually unfold she still looms large in the narrative.
Nell and Charles (pictured) were formerly a duo known as McGwyer Mortimer – ‘the best-selling folk-rock artists of 2014’
Tim Key as Charles Heath and Tom Basden as Herb McGwyer
Splendidly directed by James Griffiths, with glorious panoramic shots that will thrill the people at Visit Pembrokeshire, the film is based on a 2007 BAFTA-nominated short called The One And Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island. That too was directed by Griffiths, and written by Key and Basden.
To dip into Charles’s beloved word-play, if this longer version has an off-key note it lies in the character of Michael, whom the plot, a little unconvincingly, contrives to get out of the way once he and Nell have arrived.
But it scarcely matters, and anyway it does its job, allowing the focus to fall on Herb and Nell as historical resentments pepper their search for old harmonies.
Mulligan, as usual, is note-perfect and Basden, who did a cracking job of writing the film’s original songs, is excellent too. But Key’s is the performance to cherish: drama schools could use it as the embodiment of pathos.
I loved pretty much every minute of this enormously engaging picture, which reminded me in some ways of Bill Forsyth’s 1983 charmer Local Hero.
Surprisingly, given its quintessential Britishness – and dialogue that references Monster Munch, Alton Towers, Harold Shipman, Ken Dodd and Red Leicester cheese – it has already been a modest hit in the US, following its premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
But maybe that’s not so surprising, given its universal themes of love, loneliness, friendship, and, indeed, money.
The Salt Path (12A, 115 mins)
Verdict: A bit of a slog
The Salt Path is about money, too, but in this case the almost total lack of it.
The film is based on a best-selling memoir by Raynor Winn (Gillian Anderson), which recorded the tribulations she and her husband Moth (Jason Isaacs) suffered after losing their family home, a disaster compounded by the diagnosis in Moth of a rare degenerative disease.
The Salt Path is based on a best-selling memoir by Raynor Winn (Gillian Anderson), which recorded the tribulations she and her husband Moth (Jason Isaacs) suffered after losing their family home
Isaacs and especially Anderson (pictured) are both superb (if perhaps a little too handsome and well-groomed to wholly convince as a couple on their uppers)
Homeless and penniless, yet undaunted by his health problems, the Winns decide to do something positive, so they take a tent and walk the mighty South West Coast Path through Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall.
The film chronicles their highs and lows along the way, and it’s moving stuff, but the journey is too often a slog for us as well as for them, and I wonder if feature-film debutante Marianne Elliott, whose many credits are all in the theatre, was the right choice of director?
The coastal scenery is spectacular on the eye, while Isaacs and especially Anderson are both superb (if perhaps a little too handsome and well-groomed to wholly convince as a couple on their uppers).
But the story could have been kept a lot more taut as the Winns encounter not just the kindness, but also the complacency, hostility and oddness of strangers.
