(courtesy IMP awards)
A mistake often made is that for something to have real emotional power, an impact that rends the heart and sears the soul, that it must be big, bombastic and loud.
But while there are more than enough movies that mistakes neon sign-cloaked, well-telegraphed emotional touchpoints, clumsily executed with raw exposition and contrived dialogue, there are also a considerable number of films that know that nuance and a quiet, building deep dive into the truth of what it means to be human can be every bit as impactful and often far more authentic.
To that valuable number, you can add The Ballad of Wallis Island, directed by James Griffiths to a screenplay by two of the movie’s stars, Tom Basden and Tim Key – they also collaborated on the 2007 short film on which the movie is based, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island – a beautifully touching and very funny slice of cinematic perfection that is content to let its story tell itself.
And, every bit as importantly, to let its characters interact without hurry or a pressing need to hit certain narrative markers; that they arrive at these emotional punctuation points is a given but it’s the time taken to get there and the care and thoughtfulness with which they do that make The Ballad of Wallis Island such an affectingly sublime delight.
The film centres around three people – two of them, Herb McGwyer/Chris Pinner (Tom Basden) and Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) were once members of a successful pop duo while the third, Charles Heath (Tim Key) is the widowed husband of a woman called Marie who was a huge McGwyer/Mortimer fan and who died from cancer some five years earlier leaving Charles, who with his wife managed to win the lottery twice, living a comfortable but lonely life on remote Wallis Island.
On the fifth anniversary of Marie’s death, Charles engineers to get the two now estranged, onetime musical and romantic partners to perform one last concert courtesy of some hefty payments, an idea which to the sweetly awkward Charles seem like a brilliant idea but which comes with some pretty sizeable complications.
Take for instance the fact that while Nell, who arrives with her birdwatching enthusiast husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), knows Herb will be there, Michael is not expecting Nell to be present, an omission that Charles makes because … well, why does goofily charming Charles do anything really?
Lovely though Charles is, and he is gorgeous, his grief touchingly raw and his nostalgia for a past he can never retrieve so moving it makes you sigh in raw recognition, he doesn’t consider that a relationship that broke up in acrimony when Herb recorded a solo album and effectively broke up the duo, might not spring back to its previous shape and form and creative vibrancy just because you place the two constituent members back in close proximity.
Both Herb, who has a struggling solo pop career and Nell, now living in Oregon where she sells chutney at farmers’ markets, have issues to resolve, though it must be said that Nell has done a far better job of moving on with her life than Herb who, for all his musical experimentation, is firmly rooted in the events of the past.
Much of The Ballad of Wallis Island centres on the way these two navigate themselves to a new place of connection, and while you cannot even begin to say this rapprochement is any sort of sustained success, the moments where the two sing and play and talk are among the most emotionally intimate and meaningful of the movie.
But then so are many of the scenes involving Charles who may be adorably goofy and socially inept but who is also deeply and profoundly mired in the loss of his wife and desperate enough to reconnect with the times where he was his happiest that he offers huge sums of money to a now broken-up duo to try and recreate the magic he once had.
As anyone who has lived a reasonable amount of time will know though, nostalgia can only bear so much emotional weight, lacking the tangibility of real life and rooted firmly in thoughts, feelings and memories that for all their evocative power, simply can’t sustain any solid expressions of life in the present day.
And that is where the The Ballad of Wallis Island is deeply and lastingly affecting.
It acknowledges time and again, in quiet ways that speak massive volumes, that the past and the present may share space because the former always bleeds into the latter but that the present, when it comes down to it, can only ever rest on its own two feet.
You can draw on the past, think wistfully on it and wish desperately for it to come alive again, but the truth of the matter is it cannot bear the full weight of the present (nor can it be summoned in its original form), as Herb, who goes on a fairly epiphanic journey and Charles, who, thanks to some meddling by Nell, comes to see local storeowner Amanda (Sian Clifford), who is her own breed of delightfully idiosyncratic, as a seismic step into a lovely future, discover.
The Ballad of Wallis Island is, in many ways, a beautifully sobering exploration of how we are informed in so many seminal ways by the past and shaped by the inevitable power of resultant nostalgia, but that we must find an accommodation with the present to really live and to see life come alive again.
Nell has already learned that lesson, and it’s for Herb and Charles to find that out as The Ballad of Wallis Island sweeps you up, ever so gently and with burbling good humour courtesy mainly of Charles who has an awkwardly winning way with hilariously ill-at-ease dialogue, into a story that nods to the importance of the past, the need for the present to be its own thing despite what has gone before it, and which embraces the future as a place where life can come alive again and a whole set of new and verdantly meaningful memories can be made.