Hope Gap: Bening and Nighy act masterfully in a very British story of a frozen marriage that finally shears apart
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-minus
Imagine if, instead of divorcing, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in A Marriage Story decided to stick it out 20 more years, swallowing their issues like emotional Xanax and raising their son with extra baggage.
Make them very British and cast Bill Nighy and Annette Bening in their roles, and you’d have the emotional house of cards that falls in Hope Gap, a sad and finely tuned domestic drama by writer-director William Nicholson (scripter of things like Les Misérables, Gladiator and Unbroken). The slow pace may not be everyone’s cuppa, but it is undeniably faithful to its characters.
Annette Bening and Bill Nighy. Long held faults in a marriage finally break open in Hope Gap.
Unlike the fireworks of a younger couple’s breakup, the marriage between unsmiling history teacher Edward (Nighy) and poetry scholar Grace (Bening) is simply in a sort of emotional stasis. The couple make the smallest of small talk, usually about tea. Grace, who clearly likes a world where everything is in its place and a helpful smile cures all, is oblivious to Edward’s state of mind other than constantly cajoling him to share it more.
You know what they say about being careful of what you ask for…
The long-delayed breaking point occurs with a visit by the couple’s son Jamie (Josh O'Connor), an eyebrow raising event given that they hardly see him, except perfunctorily on holidays. In scenes with his friends, we discover Jamie has a reputation for being emotionally unavailable to the women he’s dated, a revelation he shrugs off with feigned nonchalance.
In other words, he is very much like his father, and it is indeed that same father who’s contacted him and convinced him to come home for some fireworks. Edward is about to break the news that he’s seeing someone else, is about to move out, and he doesn’t want his soon-to-be-ex wife to be alone when that happens.
From this point on, the movie belongs solidly to Bening, whose English accent is nicely subtle, and whose shattered state of control plays out almost like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of death, with various bouts of anger, futile bargaining, despair and, ultimately, acceptance. The previously little-seen Jamie begins making regular visits to his mother, comforting her, trying to talk sense, getting insights about himself and his parents, and acting occasionally as her punching bag. (There is a terrifically-written scene where she rages about his private contacts with his father, effectively calling him an accessory to a murder. “Just because there’s no blood, don’t think it’s not a murder. Marriages don’t bleed but it’s still murder.”)
No big single thing happens to turn everyone’s mental state around. Even the inevitable face-to-face with the other woman is sensible and direct. We just see the grief process progress at its natural unhurried pace, in fits and starts.
All the emotions finally bubble over relatively civilly with the odd sharp word, and Nicholson serves it up with the astonishing backdrop of the proverbial white cliffs of Dover (or thereabouts). The sunshine and beauty that surrounds the gloom is a terrific counterpoint, a metaphor for the world that carries on, unconcerned about our individual private hells.
The inexorable pace of this marital disintegration is masterfully dictated by its leads, Nighy (whose granite expression remains fairly unchanged whether unhappy with Grace or newly-alive with his new love) and Bening (without whose energy there would be no movie). Just watching them at work is worth the time. Hope Gap doesn’t scream and yell the way a wannabe Oscar nominee should, but it deserves to be seen.
Hope Gap. Written and directed by William Nicholson. Starring Annette Bening, Bill Nighy and Josh O’Connor. Opens Friday in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Victoria and Hamilton.