It's all about timing. Clemency had read and been enchanted by Raynor Winn's 3 autobiographical books about long distance walks, and I knew she wanted to see the new movie of the first of those books, The Salt Path. Today, we finished lunch by 12.30 and I chanced to notice that the little cinema under the Town Hall had a showing at 1.00, and, what with this being Dunedin and all, we decided, drove, parked and were seated with five minutes to spare. Of course I knew the outline of the story, but really, I was just there for moral support. It turns out that moral support was needed, only not from me.
We were only a few minutes into the story when I felt the tears welling up, and there they stayed, not far from the surface for the next 1 hour and 55 minutes, finally breaking cover in the final scenes shot inside some tiny abandoned chapel on a hilltop above a wild British coastline.
You may be familiar with the plot. Raynor Winn and her husband Moth, middle aged, well heeled and comfortable, suffered two catastrophes almost simultaneously. Moth was diagnosed with an incurable and terminal degenerative disease and a bad business deal costs them their home, their livelihood and all of their possessions. Unable to get any form of benefit or other support, homeless, and not knowing what on earth they were going to do, they set out to walk the Southern Coastal Path, a 1000 km walkway around the coast of Southern England.
It's an arresting history, of course, and that's part of what touched me. Purely as a piece of art, who could fail to be impressed watching movie making this accomplished? As the Winns, Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson are... well... Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson. At the top of their craft, they give a convincing, sympathetic, engaging portrayal of a couple whose world had collapsed around them and of the pilgrimage, through which they find a redemption. The film is beautifully paced, filling in the backstory of their personal catastrophes in such an understated, nuanced way that the power of the events is somehow all the more gripping. There's a term, pathetic fallacy, meaning that the weather, the landscape and the settings of a play/movie/novel mirror what is happening to the characters, and the movie uses this device extensively without it being too overt or too cliched. There are some subtle visual metaphors showing up every so often and a few minor characters pop in for a visit once in a while, but the force of the narrative is carried by Moth and Ray, one or both of whom are present in every scene. It's moving, but mostly, my engagement with the story was all about timing.
The day before yesterday, I lay in an extraordinarily expensive plastic tube. A pleasant young man injected a radioactive tracer into my arm and then had me lie very still while the tube read my entrails. This happens to me every so often, and although I now have a long history of defying the pessimistic prognoses of guys with stethoscopes around their necks, the palaver around a CT-PET scan is still a great way to face myself with my mortality. When they look at the resulting pictures, there is no question about what they are going to find. The only questions are about its geography and accessibility, and my immediate future turns on those two questions. My ultimate future, also, I suppose.
So the scenes of Moth in his doctor's office having THAT conversation, and of him limping gamely along behind his wife were a little confronting. He looked a bit like me, and I recognised, in him, many of my opinions and mannerisms. Usually I can maintain a good, critical distance from the characters in movies. Today, not so much. I could also see something of Clemency in Ray, but more than our projection onto the principals, it was the relationship between them that was compelling. A long marriage in which you have shared together the best and worst that life can offer; when both of you, at some stage or other have stuffed things up; when you have lived through times when everything turns to dust and all you have left is each other: when your knowing of each other is decades deep: this time tempered bond is a precious and rare thing, and here it was acted out with aching, exquisite accuracy.
So we sit together in the dark cinema, she and I, and watch as people's lives are transformed through the sacrament and oracle and therapy of pilgrimage. We know that dynamic. We know exactly how that works. But wait, there's more.
Lately I have been reading Peter Kingsley. I won't bore you with the details but he is a classical scholar, whose book Reality examines the life and work of the Greek philosopher Parmenides. Yes, I know, riveting stuff. Except it has been. Kingsley has presented me, again, with the notion - repeated by countless sages, mystics and philosophers, including, of course, Jesus - that the world we build for ourselves is illusory, and that the path to a knowledge of reality lies through the death of those illusions. And here, on screen, was a couple whose comfortable, sensible world had evaporated, and yet, in the face of nothingness, they find that they are immensely whole and immensely blessed.
In the penultimate scene of the movie Moth and Ray are in that ancient chapel on a hilltop, having battled their way through storm and sea and starvation and disease, Moth says, and I am paraphrasing, that once they had a house and money and possessions, and those things were what defined them. Then they lost everything that shaped their lives and discovered who and what they were. Ray responds, saying that beneath everything else, it is his love which has sustained and transformed her, not just on this walk but ever since she was a teenager. I think Peter Kingsley would get that, and so would Parmenides. Certainly It hit home for me. It's all about timing.
