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By this point of the year, the Atlantic coasts of Cornwall and Devon will be filling with tourists. It makes good timing for The Salt Path, a true story of grandstand English scenery and deep personal crisis. The film is based on the hit memoir of Raynor Winn, who in 2013 tumbled through the cracks of society alongside husband Moth. She was 50 and he was 53 when a bad investment saw their Somerset farmhouse lost to a court order.
Left homeless, the two made a remarkable choice: to spend the foreseeable future walking the 630-mile South West Coast Path, while eking out £48 a week in tax credits.
The Winns are played here by Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. Early on, that can feel jarring, two very familiar actors playing an ordinary couple made destitute (and each with a Midlands accent). Isaacs has physical hardships to convey too. The day after the legal judgment, Moth Winn was diagnosed with CBD, a rare degenerative condition. The tone is set to heartwarming but the journey is a faltering grind along coves and clifftops, the couple sleeping in a cheap tent bought on eBay.
Winn’s bestseller will guarantee the film a crowd. Still, shaping the material into a movie will have been harder than it looks. Scriptwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz has to make some unsentimental calls to ensure the feelgood lands cleanly. Detail as to how the Winns lost their home is sparse. Their university-age kids are footnotes. The focus is kept tight on Raynor and Moth (and Anderson and Isaacs). The camera always returns to the couple together, stubbornly in love, a two-person fortress.
But if the casting asks for suspension of disbelief, the performances are excellent: that solid emotional core lets the movie add light and shade elsewhere. Given the inimitable weirdness of life, the Winns make their odyssey at the same time as beloved poet Simon Armitage walks the route for a heavily publicised book project. Among strangers, kindness is evident. So too awkward embarrassment. Cream teas and Londoners with second homes abound, until the weather turns grim.
That much hints at a tension in the film as well: a tale of desperate penury that offers famous faces, gorgeous scenery and artful uplift, made to be seen in a boutique cinema. But maybe that is just me being a buzzkill. The movie does what it does with aplomb.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from May 30
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