Annette Bening and Bill Nighy are terrific as a middle-aged couple who have everything – except a happy relationship
The last film playwright-screenwriter William Nicholson wrote was Breathe, a based-on-a-true-story drama about a deeply happy marriage challenged by the inability of the husband – a polio survivor – to breathe without a respirator. With Hope Gap, Nicholson’s adaptation of his own late-80s stage play The Retreat from
Moscow, the dynamics are flipped, presenting the story of a couple who have just about everything a middle-class retired couple could want – security, a lovely house on the English south coast, their health – apart from a happy marriage.
Light-stepping, terminally recessive schoolteacher Edward (Bill Nighy, dialling it down to give one of best performances in years) has fallen out of love with his perpetually critical, intellectually rigorous wife Grace (Annette Bening), who has been compiling an anthology of poetry for years. When their adult son Jamie (Josh O’Connor, exceedingly good at projecting shy vulnerability beneath a superficial cheeriness) comes for a visit, Edward reveals his plans to end the marriage and move out, forcing Jamie to act as a mediator between his muddled father and raging, wounded mother.