THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 19, 2024

First of all, there is a lot of walking in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, as one might gather from the title. One day, Harold Fry (Jim Broadbent) decides he's going to walk about 500 miles from his home in Exeter, a city in the Southwest of England, to the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, in the north of the country near Scotland. Harold has a good-enough justification in his mind, having to do with a friendly co-worker from years ago who's dying, but the reason that relationship is so important to him is one of two key things the man decides to keep to himself.

Those secrets are the only things that keep the story of Rachel Joyce's screenplay, based on her novel, going. However, they're not quite enough, either as mysteries or as revelations, to give this thin material the emotional impact it's attempting to have. One of them is obvious, and the other seems to be one thing, only for the truth to be anticlimactic and not say much more about our protagonist than the first unspoken detail.

What this results in for director Hettie Macdonald's movie is lots of scenes of Harold walking, across the English countryside and through assorted cities or towns, and occasionally encountering strangers, who need help and/or find the man's on-foot journey to be inspirational or foolhardy. The ultimate idea of this story, without giving away too much about Harold's actual connection to the dying friend or the other thing about which he won't speak, is that even the simplest of interactions with other people can have an immense impact on someone's life. There's probably a more direct route this story might have taken to make that point without the whole thing feeling like a string of diversions and distractions.

Instead, Harold just walks and every so often talks to someone he meets on his long trek. It's prompted by his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton) getting the mail one day, handing her husband a letter from the former co-worker, and looking rather hurt when the contents of the letter leave Harold in dismay. The old friend, a woman named Queenie, is writing to tell Harold that she has cancer, is in hospice, and just wanted to offer a goodbye to him.

Initially, Harold is just going to send a kind, compassionate note to Queenie, but his walk to the nearby postbox turns into a hike to the local post office. He doesn't stop to post the letter, though, and his ambling leads him to a local shop, where the clerk listens to his story about his friend dying and offers a hopeful anecdote about her aunt. She had cancer, but the young woman had faith the aunt would recover. Sure enough, she did.

That gives Harold some hope, so he calls the hospice facility, telling a nurse to tell Queenie that he's on his way. If she stays alive, he'll keep walking until he gets there.

The big question, then, is why this woman matters so much to Harold. What we see from a single memory, of him driving Queenie (Linda Bassett) home from work, isn't much help to figure out the significance of the relationship, so we're left with only assumptions. An affair seems obvious, and poor Maureen, left alone to clean an empty house and cook meals for one and just exist in silence, has had that thought for years. Maureen becomes a figure of focus here, too, as she curtly takes her husband's nightly calls from hotels and confides in neighbor Rex (Joseph Mydell) that her and Harold's marriage has been dead for 25 years.

Joyce keeps pushing our expectations in that direction, even as the story itself doesn't offer much to keep our interest beyond the riddle of Harold and Queenie. His conversations with those strangers don't provide much, except to let us know that Harold is a quiet but kind-hearted man, he knows what it's like not to let go of things, and he and Maureen have a son. The son (played by Earl Cave) becomes the second mystery, with flashbacks showing Harold having difficulty connecting with him and the son developing issues with substance addiction. It becomes clear early on where these memories are heading, especially after Harold gains a follower in Wilf (Daniel Frogson), a teenager who also issues with drugs and thinks joining this pilgrimage will help him.

Harold becomes famous, too, as his story spreads and the news starts covering his mission. There's something of an allegorical bent to his celebrity, since people start following him despite not knowing who he is or what his actual relationship with Queenie was. If there's more to that than a throwaway line about people looking for some kind of faith in troubling times, that's not in the movie, either.

Broadbent does carry a lot of this, because he's an actor who can be instantly sympathetic with little effort. He is in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, especially as the character reckons with guilt and regret in the last stretch of this intentionally rambling story. Just because a tale rambles, though, doesn't mean it has to be aimless, but the manipulative mysteries and stretched-thin ideas make this one feel that way.

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