Don’t hold your breath if you’re waiting for drama
Breathe 12A cert, 117 min ★★★★★ Dir Andy Serkis Starring Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Tom Hollander, Hugh Bonneville, Ed Speleers, Stephen Mangan, Diana Rigg
If the name Robin Cavendish doesn’t ring a bell, here comes Breathe to set you wearisomely straight. A tea-broker who contracted polio in Kenya in the late Fifties, just a year into married life, the paralysed Cavendish was put on a respirator and given months to live – but more than 20 years later, thanks to a wholegrain blend of resourcefulness, gumption and an upper lip so stiff it could have supported his own body weight, he was still going strong.
Andy Serkis’s directorial debut initially promises to be a rare shot at sincere romantic melodrama based on Cavendish’s story. Its opening five minutes, which introduce Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy as the young Robin and his wife-to-be, Diana, feature swoony strings, an elegant title font, and its central couple dancing to a crackling gramophone at sunset.
But depressingly, it very quickly turns out to be a punishingly twee instructional biopic, in which a testing human life is boiled down into the screen equivalent of a nonprescription pick-me-up. Think The Theory of Everything without a science bit to concentrate on, let alone the scope for transformative acting seized on by Eddie Redmayne in that film, with famously Oscar and Baftawinning results.
It’s easy to feel that the film owes its existence mainly to its director’s personal connection to the source material. The Imaginarium, Serkis’s Ealing-based production company, was co-founded by John Cavendish, who’s not only the producer of Breathe but also its main character’s real-life son. And, intentionally or not, the entire project has the claggy consistency of tribute: it coddles everyone involved, including us, and is so rose-tinted you might as well be watching through Turkish delight.
Cavendish himself spends most of the film propped up in bed, with Garfield dressed in a range of elegant pyjamas, alternately pulling strained expressions of pluck and anguish. And Foy, so rivetingly nuanced as the young Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s The Crown, just gamely beetles about the place as his faithful wife, contending with doubting doctors and frazzled mobile respirator batteries. Perhaps because of its producer’s very personal proximity to its subject, Breathe never quite seems to grasp the fact that three minutes shy of two hours of everyone heroically knuckling down isn’t much to watch.
Breathe didn’t have to be a film that unflinchingly laid bare the trials of the Cavendishes’ existence, but it might have at least had the courage to be something. William Nicholson’s screenplay momentarily nibbles at a couple of juicy themes – the necessary visibility of disabled people, quality of life versus quantity of life – but scuttles off in fright each time.
“You could at least have the decency to be at the point of death,” Hugh Bonneville’s character drily jibes, when he comes to Cavendish’s rescue during a roadside breakdown in Spain, only to find the crisis has turned into an impromptu fiesta.
The actor sells the joke well, but you can’t help but notice it strikes an unfortunate chord.