True medical-romance drama lacks real life
FOR a movie called “Breathe,” Andy Serkis’ directorial debut is curiously airless — or maybe just quintessentially British — all stiff upper lip and light on emoting. But this is emotional stuff: It’s the true story of Robin (Andrew Garfield) and Diana (Claire Foy) Cavendish, who triumphed over a devastating polio diagnosis for Robin in 1958 that was predicted to leave him dead in months. Robin’s son, Jonathan, produced, which gives the film an unassailable nobility and the ring of truth. But veracity and good intentions don’t always translate to compelling cinema.
For starters, Serkis rushes through the budding romance between Robin and Diana — a meet-cute at a cricket match, a drive in the country — before they’re married and living in Kenya, where Robin contracts the disease. Garfield and Foy are lovely together, but it’s hard to appreciate their characters’ death- defying romantic bond if you have little sense of what it was like pre-polio.
Because this is Serkis, master of the digital motioncapture performance, we get a flicker of technological wizardry: The actor Tom Hollander plays Diana’s twin brothers, identical but just different enough to make you wonder if Hollander has a heretofore unknown twin. Hugh Bonneville (“Downton Abbey”) is Teddy Hall, an inventor who collaborates with Robin on the Cavendish chair, a wheelchair equipped with a respirator that allowed polio victims to escape the confines of a hospital.
Garfield’s face must do most of the acting here, and rises to the occasion with an impish grin and a raspy, posh wheeze of a voice. Foy, the heavy hitter from the Netflix series “The Crown,” projects steely determination, although she’s rarely called upon to demonstrate what full-time care for her husband, and their young son, must have been like.
“Breathe” is a sweet valentine to a couple who improved the lives of countless polio sufferers, so it’s hard to gripe too much about its reality-based shortcomings. Serkis does excel at the beautiful moments: a slow dance against a Kenyan sunset, an impromptu roadside fiesta in Spain, the joy on Robin’s face as he takes his first spin in the chair. I left dry-eyed but charmed — a nice change of pace in this often gloom-filled movie season.