Film Review - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2023)

Based on Rachel Joyce’s best-selling book of the same name, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is a film about regret and faith framed through a quirky concept. It’s a movie with a lot on its plate and its heart on its sleeve. Yet the end result is sadly something of a mixed bag.

The titular Harold Fry (Jim Broadbent) is a retired ex middle manager for a Brewery company. He lives with his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton) in Devon, but the way they barely say anything to each other implies that something is broken between them. One day Fry gets a letter from an old friend, Queenie, who is living in hospice care in Berwick-Upon-Tweed. Motivated by his friend’s imminent ing, Harold impulsively decides to start walking all the way to Berwick-Upon-Tweed. His thought process is that if he keeps walking, Queenie will keep living. Partaking on this near 500 mile walk forces Harold to confront both his past and his present.

Joyce, who also pens the script, captured a rare form of loneliness in her original novel, and she translates this aspect well into cinema’s visual dimensions. The sweeping cinematography is beautifully captured, glorifying the countryside and urban sprawls that Harold walks through as he ventures to the topmost corner of England. While the musical score, consisting largely of pianos and string instruments, is pretty cloying – seeming to figuratively take a violin bow to your heartstrings – there is a melancholic quality infused into the visual style. Even as Harold walks to his destination and his crowd of ers grows larger, he still seems singularly alone.

Broadbent is a British legend and he does well to portray the character’s bottled up burdens. He carries this sense of foreboding even as he journeys to Berwick-Upon-Tweed, even as he optimistically, even blindly, believes his walk will somehow bring Queenie back to health. We eventually learn that this ties into a past tragedy that Harold still wallows in regret over, adding weight to Harold’s seeming despondent state. Broadbent adds gravitas to the character as the film explores themes of trauma and guilt.

Yet, on the whole, there is something to the film that is bland at best and saccharine at worst. While the visuals are distinctively picturesque, the constant usage of rays of sunlight creates something seemingly biblical about the presentation. It is a film about faith, so this does make sense on a surface level, but it again feels cloying. The on the nose dialogue really doesn’t help either as the film has a habit of spelling out its themes bluntly, as if afraid it’s somehow being too subtle by using visuals.

The blandness comes from an overreliance on melodrama and a repetitive habit of under developing the numerous characters that Harold comes across while on his travels. Rather than create a few meaningful encounters that drive Harold further to the answers he seeks, the film wants to do a bit of everything. Harold meets a religious teenager (Daniel Frogson), a Slovenian nurse working as a cleaner (Monika Gossman), several travellers that accompany him on his walk for their own selfish purposes, and seemingly endless numbers of café and pub dwellers whose names we barely let alone their purposes.

The aim is apparent – showing how varied humanity can be – but outside of the Slovenian nurse, who is really interesting, and the religious teenager, who is supremely irritating, they are collectively one note. They function more as spokespeople for the film’s themes rather than meaningful dissection of the character arcs or morals. It feels ham-fisted in approach. When twinned with the overly inspirational vibe to the narrative and visual style, however well crafted, it creates a film whose sentiments are earnest but whose execution is flimsy at best and borders on manipulative at worst.

The Duke is readily available on streaming services.