The Salt Path: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs are weighed down by their script

Telegraph

5 days ago

For most travellers, walking the 630-mile coastal path from Minehead to Poole – tracing the whole finger of the Southwest Peninsula – might be cause for a two-month hiking sabbatical. For the married couple in The Salt Path, based on a 2018 memoir by one of them, Raynor Winn, it became the solution instead to a more immediate problem: they'd lost their home.
After an unwise investment in a friend's failing company, they forfeited a court case and found their farm repossessed. The health of Moth (Jason Isaacs) also declined alarmingly, and he was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (CBD). When he and Raynor (Gillian Anderson) decide to heave on their backpacks and set off regardless, they have hardly any cash to hand, subsisting on instant noodles, charity, and whatever else they can scrape together.
This modestly scaled drama is the feature debut of the fêted West End theatre director Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Company). It makes genuinely important points about homelessness, and the middle-class horror of ever crossing that line. But the script, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, She Said) is a surprising letdown. It strikes the ear as a Cliffs Notes version (pun intended) of Raynor and Moth's coastal trek, with too many exchanges milked for nudging significance: an argument when the couple's tent is almost washed out to sea, about whether it constitutes their new home or not, is par for the course.
Humour – even of the gallows kind – is not a huge strong point, either. That said, in one genuinely funny interlude, Moth is mistaken for the well-travelled poet Simon Armitage at an ice-cream van, and the couple get invited for an excruciating moment to a spontaneous soiree at someone's home. The pin-drop silence that descends when Raynor disabuses their hosts is hilariously bleak.
Isaacs, on a roll with this and The White Lotus, is never not grittily believable. Perhaps the female perspectives framing this story, from page to screen, made it inevitable that he would cede the more lingering close-ups to a luminous Anderson, who digs as deep here as she might in a Beckett play – Happy Days, perhaps, with a smattering of Godot. Raynor seems to be gazing out at her own ruin, pre-grieving her husband, and mourning past contentments, all at once.
The cinematography, by French legend Hélène Louvart, straightforwardly roams these craggy headlands right alongside the Wynns. But, for all the most fascinating glints of quartz, and scars of attrition, we need only look in our leading lady's face. It turns to the sun for nourishment and balm whenever the sun is there: sunlight is free, after all.