Marianne Elliott is an extraordinary theater director. Modernist and (tastefully) ostentatious in her staging, she never loses sight of the soft, squishy human heart at the center of her productions. But also fair to observe is that she benefits from the privilege of working with some of the greatest written material of the last eighty years — works like The Death of a Salesman, Angels in America, and Company. How would she fare with more modest material, such as a (possibly embellished) memoir? Moreover, would her outré stylings transfer over to the humble digs of the cinematheque? Questions nobody was asking, surely, yet she prompts them herself with her filmmaking debut The Salt Path, which wends itself to American screens just shy of a full two years following its premiere at TIFF.
Such a leisurely promenade between premiere and commercial release would spell doom for a certain kind of movie, but for The Salt Path it’s rather fitting — and not just to let the stink of a series of articles published by The Observer last year lambasting its real-life subjects subside. Whether one buys into the conceit that the Winns were truly as down and out as Raynor’s memoir suggests will no doubt color how one approaches the film adaptation, (this writer is inclined to believe that all memoir, intentionally or not, includes some form of fabrication), but the art of fiction filmmaking is a very different beast indeed. It is the director’s imperative to fabricate not only characters but also a world that is convincing, and Elliott is only up for half the challenge.
Set on and around the South West Coast Path in England, The Salt Path follows Raynor and Moth Winn as they slowly walk around the outskirts of the English Channel wrestling with homelessness in middle age and Moth’s recent diagnosis of Corticobasal degeneration, a rare and ultimately fatal neurodegenerative disease. A lowkey and (superficially) contemplative trek, The Salt Path just barely justifies its existence by depicting the unhoused with a degree of dignity unusual for a mainstream film; otherwise, it’s practically indistinguishable from any number of melodramas about people in middle age finding their truest selves outside the boundaries of their comfort zones.
The Salt Path lays the Winns’ predicament prosaically bare, resorting to flashbacks early on so we understand exactly why these two people might’ve ended up with empty wallets and emptier bellies. Individual moments, like when Raynor steals some spaghetti from Moth while he’s looking the other way or the palpable anxiety we feel as Raynor holds her breath withdrawing 40 pounds from an ATM, are plenty to suggest the severity of their predicament, and Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs (as Raynor and Moth, respectively) put an enormous amount of effort into selling these small moments — hunched over, frazzled, and unafraid to look stupid with smartphones in their hands. But Elliott doesn’t trust her actors to communicate the Winns’ suffering: she insists on a contrived urgency that wilts away under the slightest scrutiny. Simple stuff like the nature of the Winns’ homelessness or the seriousness of Moth’s condition could have easily been baked into the narrative’s present tense, and it’s a much stronger movie divorced from the conflict’s impetus.
The Salt Path is most of value as a sort of moral hangout film, one wherein we get to know two people through an accumulation of small kindnesses shared between them. It’s a franker and more nonjudgmental take on the UK’s homelessness crisis than Harris Dickerson’s arch Urchin, which depicted the life of its protagonist as a series of insurmountable catastrophes. Here, Elliott emphasizes the Winns’ essential humanity — busking for change by reading aloud passages from Beowulf, lovemaking in a damp tent, sharing tea on a budget by ordering one pot and asking for some extra hot water on the side — and the couple does emerge, ultimately, as believable.
Yet the believability begins and ends with that couple. There’s a picaresque quality to The Salt Path that feels undercooked: the Winns meet plenty of people on the road, but the interactions are brief and not much is gained or lost by any of them. A man, thinking Moth is a famous poet, invites the couple into his lavish home, only to promptly remove them when Raynor plainly admits Moth isn’t that poet; another man feeds them fruit for no reason other than his own eccentricity; and a young girl they take under their wings for a spell is so nondescript that she’s practically a ghost. The weightlessness of these interactions would be fine if Elliott made up for it in the depiction of the environment around these people, but while she brings a theater director’s eye for space with her behind the camera (i.e., she creates a lot of it for her actors to work in), she left her bag of expressionistic tricks from her days directing theater back in the West End. A swooping drone shot juxtaposed with swelling strings doesn’t communicate the nourishing qualities of nature on its own — it has to come from a felt place, and in The Salt Path, nature is touched with the awkward, splotchy fingerprints of a tourist.
Walking amongst nature is one of human life’s great gifts. It provides exercise for our bodies, and it gives the mind space to free itself from the constraints of a busy day. “I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his essay “Walking,” “which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” But The Salt Path is a straight and self-conscious march toward half-hearted truisms like “You are my home.” If Nature had a voice, she would groan. Look instead to Peter Weir’s underrated final film The Way Back for some exceptional walking cinema; or better yet, go outside.
DIRECTOR: Marianne Elliott; CAST: Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs, James Lance, Denis Lill, Hermione Norris; DISTRIBUTOR: Rialto Distiribution; IN THEATERS: August 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 55 min.
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