Film review: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs are remarkable in The Salt Path

Gillian Anderson in The Salt Path

The Salt Path

★★★★★

Sometimes the only way home is to simply walk out your front door. The Salt Path (12A) opens with English couple Ray (Gillian Anderson) and Moth Winn (Jason Isaacs) being evicted from their farm, virtually penniless and with nowhere to go.

Casting around in desperation in the moments before they are forcibly removed from their home, Ray alights on a battered travel guide, and makes a snap decision: despite Moth’s incurable degenerative disease, the pair pack a small tent and start hiking out around the West Somerset Coastal Path.

And that, in a nutshell, is the plot of The Salt Path, a story salted not only by ocean spray but bitter tears as Ray and Moth take stock of their lives, their marriage and themselves whilst slowly hiking the hard yards into their precarious future.

Adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz from Raynor Winn’s memoir, and directed by Marianne Elliott, The Salt Path is a story of major losses and tiny victories, of constant pain and simple joys, of sifting life’s hard-earned truths from the chaff of ephemeral irrelevancies.

The slow, epic trek is regularly punctuated with unexpected meetings, occasional rudeness and — more frequently — the kindness of strangers. With no roof over their head, Ray and Moth become more observant of the world around them, growing closer to nature and adapting their pace to the slower rhythms of nature.

There’s humour here too: at one point Moth is mistaken for the English poet laureate, Simon Armitage, which leads to a very welcome cold drink, hot meal, and even a massage for Moth’s weary body; later, Moth — who is reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf as he trudges along — will lean into the mistaken identity and busk an impromptu public reading that buys that evening’s fish and chips.

But this is no idyllic hippy-dippy yarn: the couple are at the mercy of the ever-changing weather, subject to brutal economic realities and acutely aware that Moth’s agony is worsening the further they go. Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs deliver remarkable performances, and particularly in terms of the couple’s intimacy: married for 20 years, Ray and Winn are like a pair of trees growing into one another, stripped bare by an unkind climate, bent but never yielding.

Marianne Elliott, transitioning from directing theatre and TV, delivers a film as spare as the story’s plot; the film is as unsentimental and healing as the windswept landscape itself.

All told, it’s a tour de force.

theatrical release

Karate Kid: Legends

★★★☆☆

Jackie Chan, Ben Wang and Ralph Macchio in 'Karate Kid: Legends'

The first rule of Kung Fu, apparently, is that everything is Kung Fu. Karate Kid: Legends (PG) stars Ben Wang as Li Fong, a Beijing-bred teenager and Kung Fu fanatic whose life is upended when his mother (Ming-na Wen) relocates to New York.

There he meets Mia (Sadie Stanley), the daughter of washed-up boxer Victor (Joshua Jackson), whose pizza restaurant owes a large debt to a local mobster. And so, against his mother’s wishes, Li starts training for the Five Boroughs street-fighting tournament and its $50,000 prize, aided and abetted by a pair of bickering mentors, aka the eponymous legends Mr Han (Jackie Chan) and the original karate kid, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio).

Plot-wise, Jonathan Entwhistle’s movie pretty much retells the story of Karate Kid (1984), although here, in a reversal of roles, the young Li gets to train the older Victor as the latter prepares for a make-or-break comeback bout, blending Kung Fu elements — the ability to ‘move like water’ and become sinuous, unbreakable — into the more traditional boxing skills.

The young Ben Wang is an amiable presence in the lead role, even if Li’s transition from martial arts novice to maestro is far too rapid to be plausible; meanwhile, the supporting characters are a likeable bunch.

The martial arts are fast and furious, and the ever reliable Jackie Chan brings some much-needed humour to the proceedings.

It’s solid, but no knock-out.

theatrical release