Annette Bening and Bill Nighy, in new film Hope Gap, join a venerable coterie of movies online about marital ups and downs in later lifeThe marital study is a staple genre of grownup cinema, yet film-makers generally like to keep it young.
From Scenes from a Marriage to Blue Valentine to last year’s Marriage Story, film history is riddled with strong, searing portraits of couples on the right side of middle age weathering various emotional crises.
Raise the age of the protagonists above 50, however, and the drop-off is significant, as if every older relationship settles into a comfy-slippers routine that isn’t worth dramatising.Hope Gap, which began streaming on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, is among the exceptions.
Writer-director William Nicholson’s staid, reserved study of a sixtysomething couple unravelling on the eve of their 29th anniversary is affecting in spite of the somewhat stifled, magnolia-walls nature of its film-making.
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