In Midwinter Break (now on Netflix), two of the best in the business try to act their way through a downbeat screenplay about a flatlined marriage. Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds play a couple who’ve been together so very long but are growing apart, and a would-be lovely trip to Amsterdam may not be enough to bring them back together. Theater director Polly Findlay marks her transition to film with this adaptation of a novel by Bernard MacLaverty, and promises something we don’t get enough of lately — a drama-for-adults that’s more about the nuance of performance than loud, grand gestures. But whether it shows enough of a pulse to keep us engaged is the question.
The Gist: “We never speak about what happened in Belfast,” Stella (Manville) narrates, and it soon becomes clear that what happened in Belfast needs to be spoken about. We open in flashback: A pregnant woman walking outdoors, decades ago. Gunshots. A bottle of milk smashing on the pavement, with unmistakably heavy-handed symbolism. Brief scenes in a hospital, one of which features a man eyeing his newborn child in the nursery. In the present day, Stella and Gerry (Hinds) are retirees in Glasgow. They moved away from the site of the tragedy decades ago. What happened? Well, the horror played out during the Troubles, but beyond that, we’ll find out eventually. For now, we get a shot of Stella getting dressed, touching her c-section scar and a second long-healed wound on her body, almost certainly from a bullet.
It’s Christmas Eve and Stella can’t persuade Gerry to join her for Mass. It’s not out of character for either of them. She’s devout (that’s her own word of self-description) and he’s skeptical. She attends the service while he stays at home with a glass of whisky, then another glass of whisky, and probably a third glass of whisky. It’s dead-quiet when she returns home to Gerry sleeping, or passed out — it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes. She pulls cold sandwiches from the fridge, moves the whisky bottle out of her way with an aggressive thunk on the table and glumly chews her depressing dinner. Then she sits down at the computer, prints something out and puts an envelope for Gerry in the Christmas tree. The next morning, he’s delighted to see she’s arranged a trip to Amsterdam for both of them. Perhaps a little getaway in one of the world’s most dynamic cities might bridge the gap between them? Perhaps it’s also a balm on the sting of not seeing their son on the holiday; they call and he doesn’t answer so Stella leaves a voicemail full of forced and phony cheer.
On the flight, we get a two-shot of Stella and Gerry sucking on candy, their lips puckered, one of the rare times they function in concert, and one of the movie’s most action-packed moments. That’s not an exaggeration. They chitchat about how nice their hotel room is, they have a lovely meal, they visit museums (Gerry likes them) and have a drink in an Irish pub in Amsterdam (Gerry likes those places, too). They even have sex. Stella’s interests are more spiritually rooted, taking them to the Anne Frank house and to Begijnhof, a small community similar to a convent where women can be devout without the extremities of nunhood. She tries to talk to Gerry about things they clearly never talk about, and her reasons for visiting Begijnhof, and he gruffly changes the subject to his hunger pangs. Later, she’ll go back to Begijnhof while he sneaks a couple more glasses of whisky even though he knows she knows he sneaks whisky all the time. She talks about the state of her soul and miracles, and in reply he grunts, “What happened to you was not miraculous.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Judi Dench vehicle Philomena covered similar Irish-Catholic-flashback territory; Manville-Liam Neeson two-hander Ordinary Love is a much stronger drama-for-adults about the dynamics of a longstanding marriage.
Performance Worth Watching: Hinds and Manville of course bring substance to ho-hum material like this — at this point, how could they not? — and might be the deciding factor when one contemplates watching Midwinter Break. Key word being “might.”
Sex And Skin: Midwinter Break cuts around the hotel-room commingling, so, none.
Our Take: During one of the couple’s routine moments of disconnect, Stella asks in a despairing tone, “What if we’ve cut the cloth of our lives all wrong?” The character is clearly in the midst of an identity crisis. She wants to find deeper meaning within her life via her faith, but feels inhibited by her marriage to a man who’s rigidly cynical about religion. A man who’s ill-defined throughout Midwinter Break despite a typically thoughtful performance by Hinds, who delivers in individual moments but lacks the support of a screenplay that’s interested in his inner life. Manville has more substantive material to work with, but without equal time to her screen partner, their differences lack the stark relief needed for us to gauge the possibility of emotional reconciliation.
Such is the key flaw of this drama, which is engineered to focus intently on its two wildly talented principals, but ultimately boils down to a broadstroked theme about unacknowledged trauma, overly familiar subject matter presented in a manner that’s at best vaguely effective — and that’s only thanks to the cache brought to the film by its veteran stars. Midwinter Break is often a formless plod through Stella and Gerry’s vague regrets.
What Findlay presents is a visually gray-toned drama, somber and quiet, with a few modestly memorable scenes but a few more that feel hollow and understated to a fault. Stella’s and Gerry’s ideologies are hazy and ill-defined, and the script feels calculated to deliver inevitable knockout monologues from both of them, Manville’s to a sympathetic stranger who’s more sponge than character, and Hinds’ to, of course, a tolerant bartender. Meanwhile, the usual lonely and melancholy strains of solo piano and violin play on the soundtrack. The mundanity of their marriage is perhaps the point, the film an illustration of a couple content to coast on superficialities. That flat tone and tempo unfortunately pervades our experience of the story itself.
Our Call: The drab Midwinter Break never fulfills the promise of its powerhouse leads. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.