★★ (2 out of 4)
Let’s start off with the positive: Lesley Manville, an Oscar nominee for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” and Ciarán Hinds, an Oscar nominee for Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” are two of the best actors on the planet.
That said, there’s no pleasure in watching them struggle in vain to scale the wall of clichés in the draggy, downbeat love story that is “Midwinter Break,” now spreading its gloom in limited theatrical release. What fun it would have been to see them play at recharging the batteries of a long marriage in a film built to celebrate their bracing intelligence and wit. “Midwinter Break” seems calculated to sap those qualities from the actors and the audiences lured in by their glorious talents.
Belfast natives Stella and Gerry have retired to quiet County Derry in their native Ireland, determined to live out their lives contentedly while she, a devout Catholic, saves her deeper thoughts for the Lord and he, a former architect, sneaks booze from the bottles he’s hidden around the premises. It’s a recipe for quiet desperation. Even their adult son prefers to phone in for birthdays and holidays rather the face the funereal gloom firsthand. I feel his pain.
It’s Stella’s idea at Christmas to give Gerry a present, a trip to Amsterdam that might help them see themselves and the world anew. He’s all for it at first. Working from Bernard MacLaverty’s 2017 novel, UK stage director Polly Findlay—knowing how amazing her actors are— seems to have left everything to them without the scaffolding of a keen script that MacLaverty and Nick Payne (“Constellations,” “We Live in Time”) astonishingly fail to provide.
It’s no pleasure watching two of the best actors on the planet struggle to scale the wall of clichés in this draggy, downbeat love story.
For a hot minute or two, it’s a visual boon to play tourist and follow Stella and Gerry around as they take in the sights and sounds of Amsterdam. He’s drawn to museums and the secular pleasures of food and drink. She’s transported by churches and the Ann Frank House, places that reflect the spiritual history of the city.
Those places trigger Stella’s memory of her younger self (Julie Lamberton) as a pregnant wife living in Belfast during the Troubles when she is nearly killed in a crossfire. We learn that as she lay wounded, Stella prayed that her unborn child would be saved, making a vow that if the child lived, which he did, that she would be in debt to her Lord for the rest of her life.
Stella’s agenda for the midwinter break in Amsterdam is to visit the Begijnhof, a home for Catholic women who vow, without becoming nuns, to live a life of piety and good works. Manville makes Stella’s longing for that life palpable, fully knowing that Gerry would find her wish foolish and impractical.
Much is left up in the air about whether Stella and Gerry will work out a compromise in their fragile future. We have only what Manville and Hinds tell us in the space between words. This tale of love among the ruins of a marriage can be frustratingly inconclusive and slow even at a scant 90 minutes, but there’s no doubt that Manville and Hinds deliver a master class in acting. What a shame that they’re shining their light in a dark hallway that closes off too many windows for understanding. With better writing and direction, I would have followed them anywhere.