The Salt Path Review

Raynor Winn’s memoir The Salt Path crashed onto shelves in 2018 with the force of a wave hitting a north Cornwall cliff face. It recaps Winn’s travels with her husband Moth, around England’s 630-mile south west coast path, the ‘salt path’ of the title, and inspired countless other readers to take up the mantle.

It’s now been made into a film, one that faces a problem endemic to all big-screen adaptations: how do you translate something internalised into the relatively impersonal, externalised world of the big screen? It’s a challenge undertaken by veteran theatre director Marianne Elliott, making her cinematic debut, and playwright turned screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, with occasionally stirring, oftentimes inert results.

The Salt Path is heavily reliant on its veteran stars Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, and for good reason. From the off, the two effectively communicate a weather-beaten sense of quiet despair, and that’s before they even hit the trail. Early on, Elliott and Lenkiewicz establish a cause-and-effect flashback structure in a bid to contextualise the characters. There are two primary motivations for the walk: Moth’s diagnosis with a rare disease and the Winn’s being evicted from their beloved family farm. In a particularly clunky moment, as the bailiffs bang on the door, the camera zooms in on the coastal guidebook that will inspire them on their journey.

Before long, Raynor and Moth are trekking up hill and down dale carrying little more than a shared tent. Beginning at Minehead in Somerset with little more than a shared tent between them, they’re forced to battle bad weather, dwindling funds and the ailing Moth’s reluctance to use his healthcare medication. Raynor and Moth’s two teenage children are largely kept off-screen and reserved for the odd fraught phone conversation; more focus on this perspective might have alleviated what feels like a solipsistic venture.

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There are deviations along the way, some amusing and some bizarre. Moth’s apparent resemblance to the poet Simon Armitage leads to a surreal interlude with a character played by James Lance, a sequence that also implicitly critiques the London-based gentrification of the south-west landscape. Later on, they’re briefly ed by a dispossessed young girl who finds solace in their company, one of the more poignant and understated moments in the drama. These incidental vignettes outline the film’s key issue: the narrative takes a poetic set-up and makes it feel more mechanical, attempting to impose rationality on the Winn’s highly impulsive and risky venture. Further down the line, there’s a strange break in the narrative that may be loyal to the events of the book, but in the context of the film, it threatens to undermine and make arbitrary the achievements of the two characters.

Inevitably, no amount of human-led script contrivance can make up for the implacable power of the coastline itself. Elliott’s camera does an impressive job of absorbing the majestic tactility of the seemingly endless vistas, eddying currents and musical birdsong, and the film is at its best when the characters are allowed to just sit with the landscape. Hélène Louvart’s cinematography and Chris Roe’s plaintive, rustic score both do an excellent job in further connecting us with this raw sense of beauty.

Isaacs and Anderson ably sell the sense of physical commitment, and they brilliantly convey the quiet heat of middle-aged love via little more than the touch of a hand and a lingering glance. The sun-bleached make-up effects also do their job in subtly suggesting the emotional erosion felt by Raynor and Moth as their journey proceeds. Toward the end of The Salt Path, Raynor and Moth are told they have the ‘look’ of two people who have been touched by the landscape. They are palpably beaten down and humbled by what they’ve experienced, but they’re also visibly and palpably alive with a renewed sense of inner fire and purpose.

This further underlines the effectiveness of Isaacs and Anderson’s performances. Pop psychology and narrative convenience are secondary when a wind-tousled, poignant close-up is pregnant with all manner of implied suggestion. Although it’s a meandering, wiggly path to get there, the quietly stirring conclusion has the cathartic effect of sea spray in the face: healing and satisfying.