Pedestrian.
THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY, like its subject, is a rather pedestrian affair, plodding, padded and hardly fleet of foot.
Recently retired, Harold Fry is content to fade quietly into the background of life. Harold occupies a house with his wife Maureen and their marriage is frozen, due to an unspeakable conflict relating to the absence of their son.
One day, Harold receives a letter and learns his old work colleague, Queenie, is dying. He sets off to the post office to send her a letter of condolence and comfort and after a strange encounter with a check out chick, decides to keep walking: all the way to her hospice, 450 miles away.
Unfortunately, the cinema’s ace of trumps, mobility, seems to have shuffled off in THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY. Walking a mile in these shoes proves treadly tedious. 450 proves unbearably so. The terrible temptation of tedium is surrendered to.
Locations are dull, flashbacks hamfisted, and the spiritual metaphor as subtle as a sledgehammer shelling a pea.
The two leads are strong and committed. Jim Broadbent as Harold Fry and Penelope Wilton as his long suffering wife, Maureen. Thank the casting of these two stars for small mercies.
Directed by Hettie Macdonald, from a Screenplay by Rachel Joyce, based on her novel, THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY dabbles and dances around the fringes of instant celebrity but fails to pack much punch on that blighted phenomenon.
THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY is unlikely to set the box office afire and the pilgrimage appears a flaccid affair, a selfish act by a selfish and insensitive man, a tone deaf act of atonement, mired in self pity.
An act of faith to save another woman is an act of bad faith to his wife. The blisters on his feet are small penance for his preposterous and pitiless neglect.
