Hiking drama is an uphill struggle
Edie 12A cert, 101 min Dir Simon Hunter. Starring Sheila Hancock, Kevin Guthrie, Paul Brannigan, Amy Manson, Wendy Morgan, Rachael Keiller, Donald Pelmear
Starring roles for 85-year-old actresses are rare enough that you wish Edie, a passion project for Sheila Hancock, truly soared. The film has her cutting intelligence right there for the taking, and unfortunately soft-soaps it.
The mere concept of Hancock, as the newly liberated widow of the title, clambering around Scottish mountainsides might be enough to sustain a trailer, but it doesn’t go the distance here. The camera swoops and glides around the enigmatic peak of Suilven – a long-lost dream for her character – and never feels like it gets close enough to what makes the woman herself tick.
The film opens with the death of Edie’s husband George (Donald Pelmear), whom a stroke incapacitated 30 years before. Her daughter (Wendy Morgan) makes no bones about wanting to enrol her in a care home, but Edie makes a last leap for independence. She remembers an idea of her father’s, to scale this fabled peak, which her husband’s physical collapse prevented her from doing. Bag packed with an ancient camping stove and old wellies, she heads for the hills.
She winds up with a helpmeet – the owner of a local camping shop, Jonny, played by Sunset Song’s appealingly diffident Kevin Guthrie, who comes to Edie’s (and Edie’s) assistance as surely as he did that film’s. But the script coyly lays on this odd-couple alliance without making much effort to deepen it.
If Edie were allowed to reflect more on her 30 years of married servitude, Simon Hunter’s film might have resonated, and let Hancock bring more of a personal stamp to her journey of rediscovery. Still, Suilven certainly looks lovely at magic hour and Hancock matches it for indomitability.