Stella (Lesley Manville) and Gerry (Ciarán Hinds), the couple at the center of the new film “Midwinter Break,” appear perfectly comfortable in their marriage. They have been at it for decades, navigating a move to a new country, changing careers and raising a son who now has a family of his own. But every marriage has its tensions, the eternal sticking points that both sides choose to accept (or tolerate) for the good of the union. Gerry’s drinking is one; Stella’s devout Catholicism (and Gerry’s lack thereof) is another.
Maybe most telling is that they don’t share a definition of “home.” For Gerry it means Edinburgh, where they have lived for most of their married life. But when Stella says “home” she means Ireland, specifically Belfast: the place of their birth, from which they fled during the Troubles. That minor semantic disagreement is evidence of a deeper spiritual divide, and the different ways the couple dealt with, and are still dealing with, a violent trauma in their past. For decades, they have politely avoided these tensions to keep the peace in their marriage. But on a short holiday to Amsterdam, the cracks start to show.
Based on the novel by Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Payne, “Midwinter Break” is that ultimate rarity at today’s theaters: a movie for adults. The film’s director, Polly Findlay, is an Olivier Award-winning theater director, known for her productions with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. This is her first film.
The story hinges so much on the interior growth and struggles of our protagonists, which can be challenging to translate to the screen. Findlay’s theater background is helpful here: You could imagine “Midwinter Break” as a play since it is, in essence, a long conversation. To its credit, the film never indulges in voiceovers, relying instead on Manville and Hinds—two extraordinary actors given a well-deserved spotlight here—to make the interior visible. It is melancholy, sweet and understated—occasionally a little too understated. But any time I felt too much distance from the characters, Hinds and Manville would inevitably reel me back in with a look, a gesture or a devastating line reading.
As an Irish Catholic, I am perhaps the ideal audience for this film. A meditation of faith, doubt, the Irish diaspora and the legacy of the Troubles? Sounds like a fun Saturday night! But despite how well the film evokes the particulars of its characters’ lives, its concerns are universal. The Irish character carries a degree of spiritual homelessness, a longing for a home that no longer exists and perhaps never did. But you don’t have to be Irish to feel that way; you just have to be human. Catholics, as a rule, are just as existentially unsettled: We are in the world, but not of it. We find love, meaning and grace here, but we also know that the ultimate questions of our existence cannot be answered by this world. We spend our entire lives on pilgrimage, the destination always just up ahead.
For Stella the trip to Amsterdam is also a pilgrimage, although she keeps this from Gerry. She wants to visit the Begijnhof, which once served as an intentional, semi-monastic community for lay Catholic women. Here, Stella hopes she can finally feel at home and honor a promise she made to God decades before. All she would have to do is leave her life, and marriage, behind. The ultimate question the couple faces, then, is not only “Where is home?” but whether or not “home” still includes each other.
In conversation with America, Polly Findlay said that this is where the story moves from the particular to the universal. “I think that the faith/not faith thing stands in for something that any of us could identify within our relationships in terms of a thing that I believe is very important, that I don’t feel that you take seriously,” she said. “I hope that what it does is to open up a conversation about the difficulty, in any marriage, of keeping faith with each other when you might not necessarily be keeping faith in the same things.”
Stella and Gerry’s trip does not answer the questions that haunt their marriage, it just brings them out into the open. They are forced to be honest with each other, more honest than they have been in a long time. That sort of honesty can bruise, but it can also heal. In our pilgrim lives, perhaps no place will ever completely feel like home. Perhaps the closest we can ever get is to share the road with someone who understands.
“Midwinter Break” is now in theaters.
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