Bening miscast in a sketchy, lacklustre divorce drama
Hope Gap 12A Cert, 101 min
★★★★★
Director William Nicholson Starring Annette Bening, Bill Nighy, Josh O’connor, Aiysha Hart, Nicholas Burns, Rose Keegan
Avery English marriage runs its course in Hope Gap, a choked drama of divorce after 29 years, which takes its title from a stretch of sheer white cliffs on the Sussex coast. The bookish couple, Grace and Edward (played by Annette Bening and Bill Nighy), have furnished their lives with bourgeois good taste in a Seaford country house, but there’s something dead and brittle in the place where love used to be.
Over the course of the film, this status quo implodes, dragging their grown son Jamie (Josh O’connor) into the fray. It transpires that meek, long-suffering history teacher Edward has fallen in love with someone else, the mother of a boy at school.
The writer-director is William
Nicholson (Shadowlands), doing an uneven job of adaptation on his own 1999 play, The Retreat from Moscow.
Strangely, the role of Grace – originated by the fascinatingly spiky Janet Suzman – is the film’s main problem area.
Bening swipes, scowls and lashes out with such intemperate energy that we’re pushed away, early, and the film has a fight on its hands to get us caring. The role urgently wants the layered understanding of her other recent work.
Confronted with such stridency and spite, Nighy does the best possible job
in the circumstances. His casting is a good deal more successful than Bening’s, and yields softly effective moments. O’connor, playing a pained young singleton who’s inherited his dad’s reticence, is as soulful as ever, but his scenes are mainly rather weak.
Parts of the writing here still have force, and Bening seems to get the hang of Grace more intuitively as the film goes on.
But Hope Gap still has a potted and sketchy quality, rarely coming close to the wrenching strengths of Nicholson’s Tony-nominated play.