THE STORY – Longtime retired couple Stella and Gerry realize that their relationship has reached a crossroads while on holiday in Amsterdam. After so much time and so many memories, long-held promises and deeply concealed wounds threaten to come to light and force them to confront their future.
THE CAST – Lesley Manville & Ciarán Hinds
THE TEAM – Polly Findlay (Director), Bernard MacLaverty (Writer) & Nick Payne (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 90 Minutes
Stella (Lesley Manville) and Gerry (Ciarán Hinds) have been married for a long time, but they still don’t talk about the tragedy that caused them to flee Belfast for Glasgow at the start of their lives together. That incident, which saw a pregnant Stella shot and rushed to the hospital, defined their lives, and now Stella can think about little else other than that event and its fallout, specifically a promise she made. Now, in her old age, she feels deep guilt about not keeping it, and that guilt is eating away at her as her marriage stagnates. Desperate, she plans a New Year’s holiday to Amsterdam. Gerry thinks it’s a romantic getaway meant to bring them closer together, but Stella has other plans, plans that will test the strength of their marital bond.
Polly Findlay’s “Midwinter Break,” adapted by Nick Payne and Bernard MacLaverty from the latter’s novel, has an elegance to its storytelling that elevates the relationship melodrama of its rather basic plot. Taking its cue from the age of its main characters, the film moves at a deliberate pace that allows for the kind of quiet introspection the characters engage in throughout. Far from trying the audience’s patience, the film rewards it, paying off every subtle glance and allusion to the backstory as it moves patiently towards its conclusion. Not that the film doesn’t make missteps on the way, most notably treating the full reveal of what happened in Belfast like a big reveal when, ultimately, it isn’t. It may feel like one to Stella, who has never spoken it aloud until that moment. Still, the film is such a small, intimate character study that treating this moment as melodramatic would make it stand out in a bad way. It’s a miscalculation in tone that doesn’t have a huge impact on the film as a whole, but reveals a lack of trust in the audience that isn’t present anywhere else. Throughout the entire rest of the film, Findlay adopts a subtle approach to storytelling. In this one moment, though, she whips out a Sharpie and underlines the text in bold, calling your attention to something that the film has suggested often enough that its reveal isn’t even a tiny surprise, despite it being treated like one.
Despite that slight misstep, the film still works as a lovely late-in-life relationship drama thanks to its stars. Manville and Hinds are two of our finest actors, and seeing them together is a treat. The screenplay doesn’t ask them to stretch too much, but that doesn’t mean these are easy performances to give. The subtle register most of the film works in requires them to portray multiple conflicting emotions at once, without going too big with their reactions. This is catnip to veterans of the British stage & screen like these two, and they approach it with typical care for characterization. In the smaller role, Hinds has less solo screentime to delve into his character, but he fully embodies the comfort and self-loathing that define Gerry. He has grown so comfortable in his marriage that he believes he is able to hide his rather obvious drinking problem from Stella, but refuses to stop himself, as he hates himself even more when he’s not drinking. Finally forced to confront the problems within both himself and his marriage, Gerry first shuts down in typical masculine fashion before realizing (in typical masculine fashion) that he doesn’t want to lose the most important person in his life, and Hinds plays this realization with such deep humanity that you feel for him despite the character’s oft-unfeeling disposition.
Manville, for her part, gives a dynamic performance even within the narrow range of expression the film’s tone allows. Stella drives the story, and Manville plays her as a woman desperately trying to come into her own by doing everything she can think of to revitalize herself. She’s reluctant to do the thing she’s already decided she must, and watching Manville work through Stella’s grief and guilt over the past while simultaneously working through her ever-evolving feelings about herself and her marriage in the present offers more thrills than any big-budget CGI spectacle. Manville is a wonder, providing this low-key drama of messy, imperfect people a beating heart that keeps you invested and rooting for both Stella and Gerry to find some way to reconcile their differences and come together.
All the while, Findlay keeps things as elegant as possible in the director’s chair, going in for close-ups wherever she can to let the actors’ faces tell the story and sparingly utilizing the potent emotionality of Hannah Peel’s score. She manages the mixture of warmth and cold beautifully, carefully choosing the moments to pull back from the characters so that we feel the distance. All this makes “Midwinter Break” a richly emotional midwinter film for audiences starved for restrained, mature storytelling. For older audiences in particular, the film’s themes relating to time and emotional distance will resonate deeply. While younger audiences may not find the film as sticky in their memories, there’s still plenty to appreciate, and the film’s subtlety reveals more layers of meaning the more you think back on it, leading to a rewarding experience for audiences of all ages.
