Walking With Harold

Sam Lee - Sweet Girl McRee

I was so happy and surprised that my wife bought tickets and popcorn for The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry after I finished work! I was going to see it by myself but she came along and organised everything! I was very happy.

The film was pretty good. It was one of those few instances where I read the book first before the film. Since I bought the movie tie-in copy, I already had the image of the actors and look in my head. I enjoyed the book so much that when I was reading it, I was listening to the soundtrack also. It’s a great little soundtrack by Ilan Eshkeri who also did the music for Ghosts of Tsushima, the PlayStation game.

The film had the modern British editing and “matter-of-fact” subject framing, seen a lot in British documentaries around the 2000s. The photography was exactly what it needed to be and looked gorgeous. Seemingly bland but sumptuous in colour and clarity.

The pacing and piecing of the original story was very economic and fast. Where the characters had room to breathe and marinade in the book, the movie glossed over it very quickly. I was a little let down by some of the placement of critical events that softened the blow for the characters. It wasn’t as sensual as it could have been and kept everything at a distance like checkpoints or bookmarks. There are great examples of sensualism in movies like Megane and A Clockwork Orange that hyper focus on the seemingly mundane rudimentary actions of repetition to become hypnotically alive. Megane focuses on the sounds and “feel” of food being eaten in some scenes whilst A Clockwork Orange used repetition and the camera to gaze on the “space” of the characters. Meet Joe Black is another good example of emotional gravitas between characters in a scene. Since the book was based a lot on walking and mental gymnastics, with the mundane becoming magnificent it unfortunately didn’t take the opportunity to go there. The pacing felt “one-note” and taxing to get through as a film instead of feeling taxing from the characters. Ruminations are better exemplified in films by Terrence Mallick, particularly Badlands.

It almost goes without saying that Jim Broadbent and Penelope Milton were fantastic and made Harold and Maureen come alive. Their expressions said so much. You won’t be disappointed by them.

Either way, I’m just happy to have seen this film as soon as I finished the book. It was a great book and it’s great to see a film that puts a nice visual to its pages. It’s not the kind of story or film that will get circulated a lot. The subject matter I feel is very pertinent to self discovery and reflection, particularly with modern technological dependency. I think that’s why I was drawn to it in the first place. It looked like Into The Wild where the character breaks free from mental prisons to explore and grow. What are your thoughts?