There are those who say camping and Jews don’t mix. However, Jason Isaacs is to the tent born in this big-hearted true story about a couple made homeless and forced to live under canvas. The Harry Potter and Star Trek actor who recently played Cary Grant in in the ITV biopic Archie here plays Moth opposite Gillian Anderson’s long-suffering yet stoic Ray. The couple were looking at a comfortable middle age before a dodgy investment resulted in the loss of the family home in Wales where they raised their children.
This backstory emerges through flashbacks during the 630-mile trek along the Cornwall and Devon coast. It is often a hazardous trail that ascends steep rocks and traverses rain-lashed clifftops – a route interspersed by seaside towns where everyone seems to be on holiday.
The journey is a battle between two middle-aged bodies and a landscape that can be as hostile as it is beautiful.
It is made all the more difficult by Moth’s rare illness, which in the first flashback sees a doctor say the words Corticobasal degeneration (CBD). It will probably kill Moth in a few years.
Be careful going downstairs, says the doctor helpfully before we cut back to the couple schlepping massive rucksacks on precarious paths.
Moth’s foot-dragging limp is now explained.
This ultimately feel-good film is directed by Marianne Elliott, one of our finest theatre directors, who was the guiding hand behind the hit stage adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. This, her debut feature film, which is about walking as much anything, is not always sure-footed, however.
The dominant image is one of Moth and Ray huddling in adversity. On multiple occasions they huddle for warmth in a freezing flapping tent. They also huddle in the flashback scene where bailiffs are hammering on the terrified couple’s front door. I don’t blame them. But Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s screenplay – which is based on Ray’s bestselling novel of the same name that was itself inspired by the walk – is locked into this recurring motif to the point of déjà vu.
Back with the scary bailiffs, a shaft of daylight has slanted through the letterbox and landed on a guidebook to the coastal path, which is how the adventure started. It’ll give us time to think, says Ray, before the front door is opened to pitiless, podgy men in stab vests.
Isaac’s face is as rugged as Cornish rocks and framed by a sea-salt-and-pepper mop and beard.
In the scene where he saves the tent from the tide he could be Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea – or Hemingway himself – were it not for the good-natured Brummie that appears every time he opens his mouth.
Despite the above missteps this is still an engrossing tale.
If the lesson is that adversity redefines our priorities, the old-fashioned perhaps even unintended moral says everyone needs shelter but there is no stronger home than a good marriage.
The Salt Path
Certificate: 12A
★★★
