Mark Reviews Movies: HAMPSTEAD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2019

It's difficult to be disappointed by Hampstead, because Robert Festinger's screenplay never really establishes any expectations or promises for what the story and characters will be. It's something of a romance, between two lonely but still seemingly content characters from different walks of life, but it's also, quite incidentally, a story about that tired, old plot device: a legal matter over a land deal. The good news is that Festinger doesn't make too big a deal out of the legal battle over a big plot of land. The bad part of that good news is that he doesn't, only because he apparently forgets about it for a long stretch of time.

This is one of the usual, major errors that screenwriters make when penning a romance and, especially, a romantic comedy such as this one. We don't want to have to care for some plot, beyond the ways in which the romantic leads meet, develop their bond, and, probably, overcome some logical or emotionally sound barrier that stands between them. Here, for example, we primarily should wonder how Emily Walters (Diane Keaton), a widow of a year whose husband left her in significant debt, and Donald Horner (Brendan Gleeson), a hermit of sorts who lives a self-sustaining life in a shack by a wooded pond, might meet and fall for each other, despite their personal issues about love and the distinct lifestyle each one leads.

Festinger might forget about the legal problem for a bit, but that doesn't prevent him from making the entirety of the story build up to a courtroom scene, in which Donald has to argue in favor of his claim to the land where his shack was built and of his way of life in general. That plot thread is enough of a distraction that it holds back on the idea of watching Emily and Donald form some kind of bond that goes beyond the necessities of a fairly useless plot.

The introductory scenes ramble for a while—so much so that it's difficult to tell when the story actually begins. The American Emily lives in a nice flat in the eponymous neighborhood of London, known for its heath and its residents' affluence. Her adult son Philip (James Norton) has been helping with the debt as much as he can, but he might be moving from London. Fiona (Lesley Manville), the judgmental head of the building's board, has set up her so-called friend with an accountant (played by Jason Watkins), who offers to help Emily but with the obvious motive of a sexual quid pro quo.

Meanwhile, Donald's quaint life could come to an end. An old hospital, on a plot of land on the heath where he lives, has been purchased by a local real estate developer to be transformed into luxury condominiums. Donald has been ordered to vacate the land, but he has no intention to do so.

The two main character have two semi-interactions before properly meeting: once when Emily discovers the shack from her building's attic (With a pair of binoculars, she watches him bathe in a pond) and again when she calls the police, after witnessing him being attacked by strangers. They officially meet in the cemetery, where Emily is visiting her husband's grave (and has an exposition-filled tantrum about what he cad he was) and Donald is simply having a sit. From then on out, they occasionally meet, talk, and, later, have sex.

There's never really a sense, though, of these characters as individuals. Yes, they're both lonely, and we get the basics of some kind of conflict in their lives (the debt and the land dispute). Those individual conflicts end up being distractions from actually seeing the leads bond in any significant way.

Instead, we get the exposition dump at the cemetery and a later one, in which Donald explains how a romance that ended in tragedy sent him to live a life of compete solitude. Instead of spending time with them, though, we get more awkward scenes between Emily and the accountant, Emily starting a campaign to save her new friend's home, and a truly strange sequence, involving a planned dinner date and a surprise party, that ultimately leads to Donald being cornered in the apartment building's attic by outraged tenants (who were mere seconds away from learning the truth of Emily and Donald's relationship).

The major waste here is in the casting, because the concept of seeing Keaton and Gleeson play off each other as variations of their traditional, respective type of character holds a lot of promise. What we get instead with Hampstead is a wholly generic romance, in which we're never convinced of any kind of love between the main characters, with a string of contrived and distracting conflicts and barriers.

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