She can't do that. It's my bookshop. It's my home.
The Bookshop sneaked into UK cinemas and out again, or so it seems, at the beginning of summer 2018. I caught it at a one-off screening at my local Odeon, having seen the photo of a friend meeting actor Bill Nighy on set in my native Northern Ireland. (The Ulster countryside stood in very effectively for England's south-east.) I'm glad Odeon found room for it in their schedule - this is a beautiful and poignant story that acts as welcome cleanser after the recent CGI shenanigans of The Meg and its rival blockbusters.
Adapted by Spanish director Isabel Coixet from Penelope Fitzgerald's 1978 novel, The Bookshop is an outsider's perspective on a very English confrontation. Emily Mortimer (you might know her best from TV's The Newsroom) plays Florence Green, a World War Two widow whose ambition it is to open a bookshop in the coastal East Anglian town of Hardborough. This seemingly inoffensive project finds opposition in the form of local socialite Violet Gamart (a sweetly vitriolic Patricia Clarkson). The grand lady has vague plans for the same damp property that Florence is renovating, backed up by a fierce sense of entitlement. But moral support is at hand in the form of literature-loving recluse and kindred spirit Edmund Brundish (Nighy)...
This is a small-scale but painstakingly observed tale, a metaphor for establishment efforts to stamp out an individual's dreams. Mortimer is an unassuming but nuanced heroine, her performance conveying the inner life of a woman stricken by tragedy but buoyed up by literary passion. Her life-affirming character is hemmed in by apathy and antipathy in the form of reluctant bank-managers, unhelpful solicitors and one particularly vapid local TV executive (James Lance in a fine display of condescension masquerading as friendship). And as her main antagonist Clarkson turns in a masterclass in passive aggression - all acid-smiling insincerity. The film has a seam of bitter humour throughout, where ruthless intentions wear a mask of politeness. But there's good-heartedness too; Nighy is both wryly funny and touching as Brundish, while Honor Kneafsey is open-faced and winning as Florence's young bookshop employee Christine.
Director Croixet provides a more austere view rural England than you find in most period films, the starkly beautiful cinematography warming into rich colour as Florence's bookshop vision is brought to life. This is a leisurely-paced piece of storytelling, most interested in its characters and what may (or in some cases simply may not) be going on within them. And when you have performances as finely judged and complex as in Mortimer and Nighy's first face-to-face encounter, it's good to have a camera unafraid to linger. The whole film has a stillness to it that brims with unspoken feelings, all of them plaintively underscored by Alfonso de Viallonga's orchestral soundtrack. Some will call it slow - I call it beautifully observed, on both visual and emotional levels.
There's a poignancy to The Bookshop that stems from the disappearance of such gorgeous independent establishments from the high-streets of modern Britain. But this film also has much to say about grief, friendship, worthy ambition and the power of great literature to ennoble people's lives, even when others' pettiness and small-minded outlooks are marshalled against them. While its geographical boundaries are limited, this story is about nothing less than how books can open minds and revolutionise the human soul. All of which turns the unlikely figure of Florence into a genuinely courageous heroine. One for our time as much as her own.
Gut Reaction: No towering emotions, but a sense of Florence's joy as she opens her first ledger and of her frustration as the forces of small-town darkness mass against her. The ending brought a tear...
Where Are the Women?: Emily Mortimer is wonderful - generally speaking and here specifically. And Patricia Clarkson provides proof, were it needed, of her greatness as a character actor.
Ed's Verdict: 8/10. Any film that has Bill Nighy's face lighting up as he reads his first Ray Bradbury novel is worth my time. Understated, painful and tender, The Bookshop is definitely one to browse.
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