Mark Reviews Movies: HOPE GAP

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 5, 2020

This statement might seem unkind and ungenerous, but there is only one person to blame for the breakdown of the marriage briefly portrayed in Hope Gap. That marriage is basically finished by the time writer/director William Nicholson's story starts, and by the end of the first act, it is finished—at least unofficially. Getting the papers signed to make it official is an entirely different ordeal, one of many for the two parties and their adult son, who gets caught in the middle of the mess.

The partner who's mostly, if not entirely, to blame is the wife, ironically named Grace and played by Annette Bening. She's a tough woman with whom to sympathize, because everything is about her. She expects her husband to make a fresh cup of tea for her, even though he sees and knows that she already has a cup sitting next to her. Grace can't finish a whole cup for reasons she can't really explain, although she suspects it's because she doesn't like endings. Whether or not that's true about tea specifically, it's definitely true in general.

Grace treats her husband's life—his wants, his needs, his job, his hobbies—only as an extension of her own. She asks him about his day at work, teaching history at a local secondary school, but it comes across as a formality of sorts. What she really wants, in fact, is for him to ask her about her day.

As for his feelings, Grace wants her husband to talk to her openly, but just before he drops the bomb that he's planning to leave her, it's clear that Grace has a set of certain answers—specific things she wants him to say her, about how much he loves and adores her—in mind. The husband might not be open about his feelings, but at least he's not dishonest. The night before he reveals his intentions, Grace slaps him for not saying what she wants to hear.

The husband, named Edward and played by Bill Nighy, is an introvert—teaching in a calm and humorless manner, walking into the house and making his tea in silence, going directly to his computer afterwards to make his daily edits to an online encyclopedia. Grace thinks this manner and such behavior denote an inherent unhappiness with things—mainly her, because that's how she sees life, as well as everyone and everything in it.

Once he has left the house and the marriage, though, we learn that this is just his way. He is calm, quiet, invested in his thoughts, devoted to his work, and more than content to live a life in silent, thoughtful contemplation. He's happy.

Nicholson's story is about two, very different people who were caught up in a serendipitous or just accidental moment about 30 years prior. They met on a train, after Edward thought he saw his late father on the platform. Grace comforted him with several lines of poetry. In that moment, Edward saw a compassionate, intelligent woman, and Grace saw a man with a depth of emotion, fully on display. Both of them were about half right, but the halves they were wrong about are too significant to ignore.

As it turns out, they only met because Edward had gotten on the wrong train. Grace seemed to believe it was fate, and but after the decades and the arguments have passed, Edward has come to see it as just a mistake: He got on the wrong train.

The first act seems generous in its perspective, in that both Grace and Edward have about equal footing in terms of focus, if not sympathy. We see them in their coupled and separate routines. We see the disagreements turn to arguments, which turn into that one-sided physical confrontation. Their son Jamie (Josh O'Connor), whom Edward has called to visit for the weekend, doesn't see the slap or his mother overturn the kitchen table, but he knows Grace well enough to anticipate how she'll greet her son and that she's capable of such actions. Once Edward tells Grace that he has had enough, that he has met another woman, and that he's leaving her, it's Jamie's job to help Grace through the process of losing the man she imagined Edward to be and a marriage that she thought had just reached a rough patch.

At this point, Grace more or less takes over the story, and it's fascinating to watch how Nicholson and Bening refuse to soften the character's obvious edges. Her son becomes the target of her passive-aggressive judgment and her need to have every part of herself validated. She has high expectations for everyone, except herself.

Meanwhile, she also appears to slide into depression, but it's difficult to tell how much of it is sincere and how much of it might be a kind of performance. We're never entirely certain, and that mystery—if her feelings are authentic or just a way to keep Jamie close—is doubly troubling. We've come to know Grace and that she might be capable of such manipulation, but we also don't want to dismiss her pain if it's as real as it appears on the face of it.

Edward remains in the story, trying to juggle his new life and the legal necessities of ending the former one, although he's mostly here to confirm what we see in Grace. Jamie has his own life, although it exists in this story to see how quickly and completely overtaken that life is by Grace. This is her show, and Hope Gap helps us to understand how and why that's just the way Grace wants it.

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