BRIAN VINER on film: The man who walked the length of England – just to deliver a letter 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (12A, 108 minutes)

Judgement:

Verdict: A road worth traveling on

Polite Society (12A, 103 minutes)

Judgement:

Verdict: Exaggerated

Even if Jim Broadbent hadn’t voiced the audio version of Rachel Joyce’s 2012 debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry, it would be hard to imagine anyone else playing the title character on screen.

He’s a perfect fit for the ordinary provincial Englishman who does something extraordinary, just like in his last starring role, in The Duke (2022).

Many of those who loved the book will no doubt disagree, but I prefer the movie, also written by Joyce. She was an actress and writer of radio plays long before she tried her hand at novels, showing those sensibilities.

It’s a very well-crafted adaptation of a story that came across as slightly mawkish to me on the page, but is so expertly propelled on screen by Broadbent and the wonderful Penelope Wilton that the mawkishness rarely surfaces; and even if it is, it hardly matters.

Director Hettie Macdonald, whose credits are mostly on TV (Poirot, Doctor Who, Howards End and Normal People), also does a great job keeping the show on the road in more ways than one.

At the screening I went to, Broadbent showed up beforehand to wish us a pleasant experience, hoping we’d consider it a “celebration of humanity.” Luckily I did.

Harold Fry’s Unlikely Pilgrimage is a calculatedly poignant picture, but sweeter than saccharine, drawing on the same deep well of English spirit and eccentricity that made The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin a TV hit decades ago; and more recently Captain Tom Moore made a household name when he started walking around his garden at the age of 99 to raise money for NHS charities. The story opens with Harold (Broadbent), who lives in suburban Devon, unexpectedly receiving a letter postmarked Berwick-upon-Tweed.

It turns out to be from Queenie Hennessy, a former colleague at the brewery he once worked for, who informs him that she is dying in hospice up there.

Bewildered, Harold writes a stilted reply that is completely in keeping with his somewhat stilted personality. Then he will post the letter. But every time he gets to a mailbox, he decides to move on to the next one.

It’s a beautiful day, after all – so nice that his gloomy, uptight wife Maureen (Wilton) has already suggested he “get out of the patio chairs.”

In that alternate universe where dear old Captain Tom stayed inside and unknown with a rug over his lap, Harold finally mails the letter and walks home. But not in this universe, which is governed by laws of wayward, brave Englishness.

At a garage, Harold is served by a young woman who remarks that with enough faith, miracles can happen.

So his little mission to post the letter becomes a big one: He’ll walk all the way to Berwick, over 470 miles, and as long as he walks, he tells himself, Queenie will live.

It is indeed a pilgrimage, spiritual rather than religious. However, the key word in the title is ‘unlikely’.

This kind of behavior doesn’t suit Harold at all, but as we learn in a series of flashbacks, it’s still defined by his life so far; notably by his dullness and his shortcomings as a father and, as far as Queenie is concerned, as a colleague.

He hasn’t been too successful as a husband either, if Maureen’s general disappointment is to be distracted.

But what emerges as he continues to walk across most of England, leaving her in a stew of resentment, is a touching portrait of a marriage that may be beyond saving. Harold also needs material help, provided along the way by the kindness of strangers.

Inevitably, he also becomes a Captain Tom-style media sensation during this time, which turns his one-man mission into a traveling jamboree for a while as admirers join him.

But it remains a thoroughly personal journey across England, a journey of redemption and self-knowledge and terrible blisters. I liked it much more than I expected.

Polite Society depicts a very different England, where two Anglo-Pakistani sisters living with their traditional Muslim parents in London get into a fight after the older of the two, Lena (Ritu Arya), becomes engaged to a mischievous doctor who is a slave to his ferocious mother (Nimra Bucha).

Her younger sister Ria (newcomer Priya Kansara) is shocked. Thinking that Lena is betraying her artistic promise and generally throwing away her life, she mischievously sets out, with some loyal school friends, to find evidence that the doctor is unfit.

That’s pretty much the whole plot, but barely hints at the madness of the movie, from writer-director Nida Manzoor (who created the Channel 4 sitcom We Are Lady Parts and makes her feature film debut here).

Ria is an aspiring stuntwoman, so martial arts loom as Manzoor tries, with only sporadic success, to combine slapstick violence and Muslim family comedy with a bizarre genetic subplot that could have been taken straight from a 1950s B-movie.

It’s an overdose of madness at times, but can’t be faulted for glee and originality.

Gloves never come off completely in George Foreman’s portrait

George Foreman was a powerful and destructive world heavyweight champion, who claims not to mind the irony that in boxing terms he is much more easily associated with defeat than victory, having lost the 1974 Rumble In The Jungle to Muhammad Ali.

Perhaps that’s why he tries to guard other aspects of his legacy, such as naming all five of his sons George; and is now underwriting a biopic, Big George Foreman (12A, 129 min, **), on which he is credited as an executive producer.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a blatant exercise in hagiography, obscuring all but two of Foreman’s five marriages and only fleetingly showing us what a dismal piece of work he was as a thieving, delinquent teen.

His later embrace of Christianity, on the other hand, gets the full job.

Nevertheless, it’s a great story and if you don’t know how he rose from poverty in Texas to become a champion boxer and later a preacher, not to mention a famous genius grill salesman, this movie might be worth watching.

If you know anything about his story, you see it for what it is: disappointingly mundane and superficial.

Another famous African American is celebrated in Little Richard: I Am Everything (15, 101 min, ****), which explores the rock and roll icon’s sexuality and his remarkable, enduring influence.

Mick Jagger and Tom Jones pay tribute, there are some fantastic clips and we hear John Lennon recall how much it meant to The Beatles to meet him in Liverpool in 1962. They were, he says, “almost paralyzed with worship.”

So can those who praise the subject of Vermeer: ​​The Greatest Exhibition (PG, 90 min, ****), which, for all of us who can’t attend the current retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, explains why Johannes Vermeer unsurpassed as an artist.

Regardless of his martyrs and saints, or even his Girl with a Pearl Earring, his 17th-century street scenes, up close, are incredible. A reward.