THE STORY – After losing their home and livelihood, a middle-aged couple impulsively set out on a 630-mile walk along the southwest English coast, a walk complicated to no small degree by the recent diagnosis of a terminal neurodegenerative disease.
THE CAST – Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs, James Lance & Hermione Norri
THE TEAM – Marianne Elliott (Director) & Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 115 Minutes
Tony-winning director Marianne Elliott has been responsible for some of the most thrilling live theater of the past few decades. From her boundary-pushing production of “War Horse” to her gender-swapped reimagining of Sondheim’s “Company,“ she has rewritten the rules for what you can achieve on stage, producing thrilling multimedia sensory experiences often praised as cinematic. It’s only natural she’d eventually find her way to making a piece of actual cinema, but “The Salt Path,“ an adaptation of Raynor Winn’s memoir about a couple embarking on a 630-mile hike along the English coast, marks a rocky start to her career in film. While she customarily gets strong performances from her two lead actors, her vision for the rest of the film feels basic, undermined by a screenplay that misjudges its audience’s capacity to feel for its characters.
Life has pushed Ray (Gillian Anderson) and Moth (Jason Isaacs) to the end of their rope. Moth has been diagnosed with a terminal neurodegenerative disease and due, to a legal technicality they’re being forced out of the farmhouse they were renovating into a B&B that would provide for them in their retirement. Without a place to live (they don’t qualify for emergency housing since Moth isn’t surely going to die within a year) and hanging onto their sanity by a thread, Ray impulsively suggests that they “just walk,“ using a guide to the South West Coast Path to walk the 630 miles from Dorset to Somerset. Neither of them is a hiker, and Moth starts limping not even 2.5 miles in, but the couple hopes that when they finally reach the end of the path, they’ll have a better idea of what they should do next. On their way, they battle the elements, each other, and the many indignities of being middle-aged and homeless.
Not that you would know any of this if you just sat down and watched the film. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s screenplay begins in medias res, as Ray and Moth struggle to set up a tent in the middle of a terrible storm. With the camera whipping around and cutting as indiscriminately as the wind and rain beating down on our heroes, Elliott certainly captures the desperate chaos of the situation. But, without a foothold on what’s going on, it’s just disorienting, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. From there, the story unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, jumping back and forth between Ray and Moth’s hike and the events that led them to undertake such a dangerous journey. This structure keeps the film from feeling too repetitive, as the hiking scenes largely hit the same beats over and over. Still, anything the film might gain in terms of narrative momentum, it completely loses in thematic connection. Because it takes more than halfway through the film to learn why Ray and Moth are doing this, it’s more difficult to relate to them in the early going, and thematic connections between them and the people they meet are revealed too late, making the film feel even more episodic than it already is.
That doesn’t stop Anderson and Isaacs from giving their all, though, and to the extent that the film does work, it can be laid mostly at their feet. The film’s structure inadvertently causes the audience to focus more on the survival narrative than the character arcs due to the lack of setup, but the actors fully commit to powering through this journey just like the real-life Ray and Moth did. For the film’s full length, their triumph is our triumph, their pain our pain. You feel everything they’re going through, but a sense of frustration also builds towards them because they’re so clearly unprepared for the trip.
The backstory of what put them on this path helps make sense of that, but since it’s revealed so late in the film, the damage has already been done. However, both actors have lovely, quiet moments amidst all the audiovisual noise. Isaacs delivers a touching poetry reading that earns the couple money to eat some real food and dry off by an indoor fire, and Anderson nails the confusion and denial of hearing Moth’s diagnosis. The way they help each other along the path is inspiring, a vision of love and commitment overcoming all obstacles despite heavily unfavorable odds. They certainly make “The Salt Path“ watchable, but the story structure built around them hinders the audience’s connection, making it much harder for them to save the film. They pull the film through the worst of the storm, but they’re much worse for the wear.
