In climate change circles the term “hope gap” refers to people who worry about global warming but feel powerless to do anything about it. The new film “Hope Gap,” now on VOD, has nothing to do with the climate, but is all about change and a person who feels powerless to prevent it.
Bill Nighy and Annette Bening play mild-mannered Edward and firecracker Grace, a married couple of twenty-nine-years. Their cluttered home displays the earmarks of a life well-lived. Shelves overflow with books and knick knacks, photographs decorate the fridge. They have a seemingly comfortable relationship; they know how one another takes their tea and pad about the house working on their pet projects, his academic updating of Wikipedia history sites, her poetry projects.
When their son Jamie (Josh O’Connor) comes to their Sussex coast home to visit there is tension in the air. Grace, in an attempt to shock Edward out of what she thinks is his silent complacency, picks a brutal fight, overturning a table and slapping her husband in the face. “He should fight back,” she says to Jamie. “I want a reaction.”
The relative calm of the seaside home shattered, Edward announces that he has long felt inadequate in the marriage and that he’s leaving, immediately. Devastated, Grace wants to try and work things out as Edward begins his new life.
“Hope Gap” has moments of humour but make no mistake, this is downbeat story about two people who were living separate lives under one roof. The overall tone is one of melancholy but not melodramatic. Nighy and Bening give naturalistic performances, each feeling the pain of the other’s actions in a battle of wills. Bening is heartbroken, angry and yet hopeful for reconciliation. Nighy plays Edward like a wounded animal, skittish and afraid, a damaged man who has retreated from the relationship.
The beauty of the screenplay by Oscar-nominated writer-director William Nicholson, is that it doesn’t take sides. Complex characters are thrown into a complicated, almost unbearable situation with no real winners. It paints a vivid picture of Grace and Edward but doesn’t judge them.
“Hope Gap” is a portrait of middle-age angst. It may not make for a good date night movie but the nuance of the relationships on display is worth the price of admission.
IN CONVERSATION WITH… BILL NIGHY : SAT | FEBRUARY 8 | 7:45 PM | THE VIC
Join us for an intimate evening of lively conversation with one of the greatest British actors working today–Bill Nighy. From Love Actually to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel to Harry Potter and many, many other notable works, this multi-award winning actor is sure to entertain with his hilarious dry wit and incredible experiences both on and off set. Following the conversation, there will be a special screening of Nighy’s 2019 UK indie hit Hope Gap.
Hope Gap is the heartbreaking and heartwarming tale about the intricacies of the dissolution of a marriage between Edward (Bill Nighy) and Grace (Annette Bening) – and the ensuing emotional fallout their divorce has on their only grown son, Jamie (Josh O’Connor)
Host of In Conversation is Richard Crouse
Richard Crouse is the host of the CTV talk show Pop Life, and the regular film critic for the 24-hour news source, CTV’s News Channel, and CP24. He is also the author of nine books on pop culture history including Who Wrote the Book of Love, and the best-selling The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, and its sequel. From 1998 to 2008, Crouse was the host of Reel to Real, Canada’s longest-running television show about movies, and is a frequent guest on many national Canadian radio and television programs.
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It has been a big year for the 26th annual event, which opened last week. Among the early highlights was a much-celebrated appearance by Bill Nighy, who attended a festival party on Feb. 7 before sitting for an hour-long chat with critic Richard Crouse in front of a sold-out audience at the Victoria Conference Centre on Feb. 8.
Kay said Nighy’s appearance at the opening gala “was a nice surprise.”
An actor of his renown is never expected to rub shoulders with the public, but his genial nature was a refreshing turn in the era of increased public scrutiny.
“When he came out on stage [at the conference centre], there was a standing ovation, and the same again when he finished,” Kay said. “People were so excited.”
Hope Gap
Director: William Nicholson
UK 2019 100 min
hopeful + tender + brilliant cast
After 33 years together, Grace and Edward’s marriage is on the rocks. Their blissful, bohemian lifestyle, on the Southern English coastline, has reached a cliff edge. When Edward urges their son Jamie (God’s Own Country’s Josh O’Connor) to return for the weekend only to reveal to all that he’s had enough and his bags are packed, it’s clear that an almighty storm is about to descend.
Hope Gap, Oscar-nominated screenwriter William Nicholson’s second film as director, tracks the unravelling of three lives through stages of shock, disbelief and anger, to a resolution of sorts. Though Jamie attempts to act as a mediator between his parents, his own relationship struggles are a reminder of how silence breeds silence down through the generations, how gaps echo from parents to their children.
Annette Bening gives a barn-storming performance as the acidic and often unreasonable Grace, firing out snappy one-liners whilst undergoing an emotional apocalypse, and Bill Nighy is superb as a quiet, though unacceptably cowardly man, who just wants to update Wikipedia in peace…
Shot with a ravishing sense of design and colour, making the most of the lush English coastline, this is an emotionally astute portrait of a marriage at the end of its life; of regrets uncovered, decisions made too late and the precariousness of hope. But in the end, it is also a story of survival. A story of hope.
“Sometimes Always Never,” a new dramedy starring Bill Nighy and Sam Riley, applies a light touch to some heavy topics.
Adapted from Frank Cottrell Boyce’s short story Triple Word Score, the film sees Nighy play Alan, a widowed tailor with a fractured family. He has a strained relationship with his ice cream van painter son Peter (Riley) stemming from an incident decades before when his son Michael disappeared after an argument over a game of Scrabble. Alan is still a Scrabble fanatic—he’s a walking dictionary of obscure, high-scoring words like scopone and muzhik—but these days he mostly plays on-line. It’s there he comes across a competitor whose word choice and style of play reminds him of his AWOL son. Could it be Michael? “The only thing I am scared of is ding before I sort this thing out,” he says.
There’s more. Alan cheats a couple out of £200 bending the rules to his favor, and hips his grandson to the joys of Scrabble over first-person-shooter games but the heart of the movie has little to do with the word game. It’s a father and son story about a tormented man who is a master of words but could never find the right thing to say to either of his sons.
“Sometimes Always Never” plays on director Carl Hunter’s background in graphic design—he has designed record sleeves for The Clash and his own band The Farm—to create the movie’s stylized, quirky look. Visual echoes of Aki Kaurismaki and Wes Anderson resonate throughout, lending a kind of magic realism to a story that is grounded in basic humanity—a search for the missing piece of the family’s puzzle.
This is another of Nighy’s gently eccentric characters, a man touched with sadness but hopeful enough to pursue an answer to the mystery that has plagued him for years. Nighy is always immensely watchable but here he brings an easy, elegant charm to Alan despite the character’s emotional handicap.
“Sometimes Always Never” is a small film about big topics that balances an overarching feel of sorrow with heavy doses of whimsy. Eloquent both visually and emotionally, it speaks volumes about heartbreak even when the characters can’t quite find the words to do so themselves.
Someone you know spends far too much time playing the adventure videogame “Detective Pikachu.” The enormously popular Nintendo game is a time waster of epic proportions, eating up minutes faster than old school Pac Man gobbling up Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. Now a live action movie, “Pokémon: Detective Pikachu” starring Ryan Reynolds as the title character, a little yellow rodent-like creature with soulful eyes, vies for your time at the movies.
Set on the day-glo neon streets of Ryme City, “a celebration of the harmony between humans and Pokémon,” the movie begins with the disappearance of police detective Harry Goodman at the hands of a ruthless Pokémon.
Looking to get to the bottom of the case Harry’s insurance salesman son Tim (Justice Smith) joins with his dad’s Pokémon partner, the wise-cracking but amnesiac Detective Pikachu (Reynolds). The two have a connection that goes beyond words… sort of. Only Tim can understand what the little pocket monster is saying. “People try and talk to me all the time and all they can hear is ‘Pike, pika.’” They’re a natural fit. One can talk to humans, the other to Pokémon. “If you want to find your Pops we’re gonna need each other.” With the aid of investigative journalist Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton) they uncover a criminal conspiracy that threatens Ryme City’s human/ Pokémon harmony.
The worldwide popularity of Pokémon pretty much guarantees an audience for “Pokémon: Detective Pikachu” but it’s hard for me to imagine anyone who hasn’t spent hours whiling away the time with the game to enjoy this as much as already established fans. It is probably the cutest crime noir film ever made but it’s also a slog that should be a lot more fun. Not even Reynolds’s trademarked way with a one-liner can liven up this convoluted script.
“Pokémon: Detective Pikachu” feels like a retro kid’s flick. Echoes of “Gremlins,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and even “Howard the Duck” reverberate throughout, but with an emphasis on spectacle rather than charm and story.
“The Limehouse Golem” is a slice of Victorian Grand-Guignol gaslight horror that owes a debt to Jack the Ripper and to the great Hammer films of he 1960s.
London’s fog-drenched Limehouse district is in the spell of a serial killer who leaves behind mutilated bodies and cryptic messages written in his victim’s blood. The ritualistic killings are so savage, so inhuman the press presume they could only be the work of an ancient evil, the Golem.
Stumped, Scotland Yard assigns Inspector Kildare (Bill Nighy) to the case. Brilliant but troubled, the veteran policeman immediately starts putting clues together even though he knows his superiors think the case is unsolvable. His first break comes with the discovery of a diary of the Golem’s crimes, written in his own hand, kept in the reading room of a library. On the day of the last entry, September 24, only four men where in the reading room, music hall comedian Dan Leno (Douglas Booth), German philosopher Karl Marx, novelist George Gissing and playwright John Cree (Sam Reid).
They each become suspects but high on his list is Cree, a pompous failed playwright poisoned by his wife Elizabeth (Olivia Cooke) on the night of the last Golem murder. The Inspector is convinced she knew he was the killer and poisoned him to stop the carnage. Now he must go full Sherlock to prove that, solve the case and save Elizabeth from the gallows.
“The Limehouse Golem” is a lurid piece of work. Handsomely decked out with fine period details and sumptuous production design, it lures you in with “Masterpiece Theatre” style only to make a sharp U-turn into Hammer Horror territory. Victims are sawn into pieces, beheaded and generally ripped to pieces in ways that would make Jack the Ripper envious. It’s gory and gruesome but what it isn’t is a thriller. Despite a labyrinthine story structure—there’s more flashbacks than you can throw a dismembered head at—the good Inspector seems to be the only one who doesn’t know who the killer is.
On the plus side “The Limehouse Golem” has great performances—does Nighy ever disappoint?—and paints a vivid picture of Victorian music hall, onstage and off. The bawdy nature of the shows nicely compliments the theatrical nature of the killings, helping to create an otherworldly, weird atmosphere.
“The Limehouse Golem” isn’t much of a penny dreadful thriller—there’s too many red-herrings for that—but it does spill enough of the red stuff to satisfy fans of Victorian horror.
On film war heroes are usually seen dodging bullets or rescuing wounded comrades from the field of battle. Rarer are the stories of those who stayed behind, never touched a gun or saw the front lines. “Their Finest” is one of those tales, a World War II drama about people who pitched in by raising morale.
It’s 1940, bombs are falling, decimating London and confidence is at an all time low. In an effort to boost the public’s confidence The British Ministry of Information, Film Division commissions a propaganda film that will be both “authentic and optimistic.” To this end they recruit Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) to provide “a woman’s touch,” or as they less politely call it, “the slop.”
Working alongside the cynical lead scriptwriter Buckley (Sam Claflin) she comes up with the mostly true story about two sisters who stole their father’s boat to help rescue soldiers from the siege at Dunkirk. Their story isn’t quite as exciting as promised but it does provide two details they can use. The sisters remember a French GI who tried to kiss them and an English soldier with a dog in a tote bag. It’s perfect they say, it has, “authenticity, optimism… and a dog.”
As they toil to craft a script that will please both the Ministry of Information and the movie’s star, aging matinee idol Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy), Mrs. Cole and Buckley’s relationship turns from testy to tender.
“Their Finest” is a feel good movie almost as melodramatic as the film within the film. Luckily the melodrama—unexpected romantic twists and deaths—is wedged between Arterton’s steely-but-sweet performance, a showy turn from Nighy—“The war has slipped off the cream and we’re left with the rancid curds,” he says, complaining there are no good waiters left in Soho—and a vivid portrait of the casual condescension heaped on women, even as they took on an expanded role in the work place.
The melodrama also helps sidestep the obvious inspirational landmines this kind of story usually offers up. The rousing ”when life is precarious it’s a shame to waste it,” message is none too subtle but is gently pushed aside by Mrs. Cole’s character development as she learns to trust herself and accept that heroes aren’t always only on the battlefield.
“Their Finest” is a love letter to film—the source novel’s title was “Their Finest Hour and a Half”—with grand statements about the magic of movies. “Film,” says Buckley, “is real life with the boring bits taking out.” But more than that, it’s a tribute to the women who kept the home fires burning… and the movies playing.
That’s the line in “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” that explains the motivation of almost every character in the story. The retirement comedy paints old age in broad strokes, but nails the dark humour of the twilight years with clear, concise and funny dialogue.
As we learned in the first instalment, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a slightly ramshackle retirement home in the Indian city of Jaipur. It’s the kind of place where the proprietor, Sonny (Dev Patel) takes roll call every morning to ensure no one has passed on during the night. His guests are mainly British expats looking to comfortably live out their remaining days… and maybe get a new lease on life.
The original hotel is almost fully booked, and with everyone is looking hale and hardy, there likely won’t be many vacancies for some time. Always a big thinker Sonny looks to expand his business with the backing of an American retirement home chain. The first hurdle in deciding whether the Best Exotic Marigold becomes a “franchise or a footnote” is quality test administered by an undercover guest. When two new guests arrive on the same day director John Madden cues the screwball comedy, injecting a mistaken identity element into the feel good story.
“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is like a mini-Bollywood epic, there’s a bit of everything—dance numbers, comedy, romance and even a murder plot. Ordinarily that would be too much for a two-hour movie—an attempt to please everyone which usually means you please no one—but here the elements fit together. Sure, sometimes the plot shards creek almost as much as the joints of the oldsters we’re watching on screen, but the goodwill the cast—who much have upwards of a 1000 years of combined screen experience—is the cinematic Voltaren that greases the script’s tired bones.
Of the headliners, Judy Dench is reliably great, touching and sincere while Bill Nighy is heartbreakingly moon-faced in love but it is Maggie Smith who steals the show. She stares down mortality with a mixture of poignantly observed insight and on-target barbs. She delivers lines like, “Just because I’m looking at you while you talk doesn’t mean I’m interested,” and “How was America? It made death more tempting,” with the precision of a neurosurgeon and elevates every scene she’s in.
“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is review proof. It’s a charm offensive from a group of actors aiming to please, and for the most part, they do.
Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death has more in common with its predecessor, the 2012 chiller Woman in Black, than just a title and source material.
The first film starred Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself, in the lead role. The spooky new movie about the strange goings-on at a haunted house during World War II co-stars Potter alum Helen McCrory and Adrian Rawlins.
McCrory, who plays Angel of Death’s uptight schoolmarm, was pregnant when Potter producers offered her the role of pure-blood witch Bellatrix Lestrange in Order of the Phoenix. She passed and the part went to Helena Bonham Carter but two years later she jumped at the chance to play Narcissa, Bellatrix’s sister and the mother of Draco Malfoy, in The Half-Blood Prince.
Co-star Rawlins is the shadowy Dr. Rhodes in Angel of Death, but is best known as the father of Harry in seven Potter movies. Years before playing James Potter the actor starred in the original Woman in Black TV adaptation as Arthur, the role Radcliffe played in the recent remake.
Over the ten years they were in production it seems like the Potter films employed almost all of the British Actors’ Equity Association. Everyone from Ralph Fiennes, Richard Harris and Gary Oldman to Maggie Smith, Imelda Staunton and Emma Thompson appeared in the series. When Bill Nighy was cast in The Deathly Hallows he said. “I am no longer the only English actor not to be in Harry Potter and I am very pleased.”
Less well known than the British superstars that peppered the Potter cast are some of the supporting players, many of which have gone on to breakout success without Harry.
Tom Felton will likely always be associated with cowardly bully Draco Malfoy, so it’s not surprising he played the spineless bad guy utters the famous “damn dirty ape” line,” in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Before he starred opposite Rachel McAdams in the time travel romance About Time Domhnall Gleeson was Curse-Breaker Bill Weasley in The Deathly Hallows. The son of actor Brendan Gleeson is on his way to household name status with a role as an Imperial officer who defects to the Republic in J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
The biggest breakout Potter alum has to be Robert Pattinson. He’s best known as sparkling vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise but he first appeared as Cedric Diggory in The Goblet of Fire. “The day before [the movie came out] I was just sitting in Leicester Square,” he said, “happily being ignored by everyone. Then suddenly strangers are screaming your name. Amazing.”
“Pride,” a new British film that mixes gay rights, a miner’s strike and the Bronski Beat, isn’t so much a movie as it is an anthem, à la Tom Robinson’s foot stomping tune “Glad to Be Gay.”
It’s the true story of an unlikely alliance, a bond between a group of Camden Town lesbian and gay activists and the miners of a village in Wales. The catalyst for the story is Mark (Ben Schnetzer), a young gay man who feels the government is bullying The National Union of Mineworkers just as homophobic Londoners had pushed him around. As the union is at the cusp of a strike that would become a year-long battle against widespread pit closures, he rallies his friends to raise money. Dubbed the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, they work the streets, collecting hundreds of pounds. Trouble is the miners don’t want the money. At least at first.
Afraid to be associated with a gay group The National Union of Mineworkers won’t even return Mark’s phone calls. When he directly contacts Dai (Paddy Considine), a union rep in a Welsh village, he finally finds someone who understands the meaning of solidarity.
“Pride” tells an interesting and important story, and does so with terrific performances. Considine brings dignity and intellect to Dai, Dominic West is colorful and compassionate as LGSM member Jonathan and Bill Nighy, as Cliff, the seemingly uptight Welsh town father, displays the effortless charm and grace that makes him the go-to for eccentric English characters.
When it works, it works terrifically well. A near silent scene between Nighy and Imelda Staunton, lifelong friends and workers for the union cause, is wonderfully under-played. It’s touching, joyful and perfect.
The rest of “Pride” is pitched somewhere in tone between the industrial comedies of “Kinky Boots” and “The Full Monty.” Relentlessly upbeat, it favors broad comedy and is occasionally earnest but it doesn’t skimp on the social history. Despite its sense of fun it delves into the lives of each of these groups. The story might be painted in broad strokes, but it isn’t afraid to tackle topics like homophobia, AIDS and intolerance.
