THERE are pilgrimages born of despair and others born of hope. The Salt Path (Cert. 12A) tends towards being the former. Based on Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir, this is an account of her journey along the South West Coastal Footpath with her husband, Moth, who is terminally ill. Homeless, unemployed, and destitute, they start backpacking from Somerset.
The opening section of the book is headed “Into the Light”, quoting Homer’s Odyssey. The film makes little allusion to this journey as being or becoming a search for spiritual transformation. The walk is undertaken to fill in time, with not even a Micawber-like belief that something will turn up. Tacitly, however, we are provided with a signifier in the shape of a peregrine (literally, pilgrim) falcon, which accompanies their expedition.
As played by Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, Raynor and Moth are suffused in sorrow with rare moments of delight. Random acts of kindness bring joy to their hearts, as when a waitress slips them a couple of pasties that otherwise would be binned. A man offers them food, drink, and hot showers, believing that Moth is the poet Simon Armitage, said to be walking the same route. Later on, we do get some poetry. In Padstow, Raynor passes the hat around while Moth reads from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.
By and large, the film is a series of episodes as they move along the coast, interspersed with painful memories of eviction, medical diagnosis, and worries about their grown-up children. What is missing is any sense of learning from past experiences, or character development and outlook as a result. When, early on in the journey, they visit Culborne Church, once a leper colony, we get none of Raynor’s sitting in the graveyard and finding it profoundly spiritual. “Something of the knot I’d been carrying started to loosen,” she wrote.
Her words illustrate the difference between literature and cinema. One tells; the other shows, or should. As a film teacher, I try to avoid contrasting movies with written texts. There are substantial differences. It would be like judging Verdi’s Otello in terms of Shakespeare’s play or the original material on which they are based. I am, however, hard-pressed not in this instance to fall into that trap. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s screenplay offers few insights into the emotional effects, positive or otherwise, of this mammoth undertaking — which is surprising as one of her previous scripts, Disobedience (Arts, 30 November 2018), movingly concerned itself with breaking free from constraints.
There are, or could have been, parallels drawn with the Winns’ unconventional response to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune hurled at them in the course of their outing. We certainly see plenty of these, whether it is almost getting drowned by sleeping too near an incoming tide or perpetually risking the threat of starvation. Only towards the end is there consideration of what they have endured. Moth says that, because of this journey of the soul, when they look at it, (life, presumably) will never be the same again. At this point, the peregrine falcon reappears, and they are pilgrims together, wending their way home.