In “Hope Gap,” a thin line between love and war
The dramatic portrait of a crumbling marriage or relationship often lends itself to intense performance, allowing actors to spar with one another while playing out heightened, if not uncommon, circumstances. Usually this involves harsh words, yelling, crying, thrown objects.
This is true of Edward (Bill Nighy) and Grace (Annette Bening), the central couple in the writer and director William Nicholson’s intimate, sometimes engaging “Hope Gap.” As the film begins, they are clearly in a Tennessee Williams-style, late-in-life rut: Edward is checked out, ambling through the motions of their day-to-day, while obsessively fact-checking Wikipedia. A restless Grace implores him to show the faintest interest in rekindling their connection and turns to aggressive tactics to get his attention.
When Edward announces he is leaving her for another woman just a few days before their 29th anniversary, Grace is blindsided and devastated. In the middle of it all is their adult son Jamie (Josh
O’Connor), who must navigate their feelings while confronting how his parents have affected his own ability to maintain meaningful relationships.
Edward and Grace are intellectuals — he a schoolteacher, she a retiree assembling a poetry anthology — living comfortably in the picturesque town of Seaford, England, and Nicholson’s script walks a fine line between flowery and restrained. Obvious metaphors comparing war and marriage abound. But while you’ve seen this portrait before, and better, Nighy and Bening are so in tune with their characters that such rote renderings are easily forgiven.