REVIEW

BREATHE is a cinema picture for which one packet of tissues might not be sufficient. Even for those hardened movie critics one could expect some audible blubbing by the end. You would surely need a heart of stone not to be moved by this beautiful film.

Breathe tells the true story of an upper-crust English couple, Robin and Diana Cavendish – brilliantly played by Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy – who meet in 1958 with the world seemingly at their feet.

They are dazzlingly attractive, privileged, sociable, and popular. Scarcely have they married and set up home in Kenya, where Robin works as a tea-broker, at least until it’s time for G&Ts on the veranda, and Diana falls pregnant. They are on the threshold of a gilded life together.

But then, out of the blue, catastrophe strikes. Robin contracts polio and Diana is told not only that he will be paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his days, but that those days are strictly numbered. He has a few months at best.

Anyone who has watched the Netflix series The Crown will recall Foy playing another young, upper-class, married woman who was also in Kenya (and, also, in the 1950s), when she received devastating, life-changing news. In that instance, it was the King, her father, who had died.

But like the young Princess Elizabeth, Diana Cavendish seems to be hewn from one enormous stiff upper lip.

She does not fall apart, because she cannot. She will take Robin and their baby boy back to England and start anew, treating the worst that life can throw at her with as much grace as she treated the best.

The producer of Breathe is Jonathan Cavendish, who was that baby boy.

 

THIS film is his parents’ story and he deserves to be inordinately proud of it, because it is not mawkish or even overly sentimental, as in lesser directorial hands it might have been.

The director is Andy Serkis – better known for his work in front of the camera as the so-called king of motion-capture, the technology that allowed him, so exquisitely, to inhabit Caesar in the Planet Of The Apes films, and Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings series.

Here, with the help of an excellent screenplay by William Nicholson (who explored similar territory in his play Shadowlands), he has mastered what you might call emotion-capture.

Breathe is a searingly moving, impeccably sensitive and, at times, very comical depiction of a uniquely British response to dreadful adversity.

At first, however, Robin simply wants to die. Trapped in an English hospital bed, hooked up to a respirator that by today’s standards looks impossibly antiquated, he can’t bear what he has become. He won’t even look at his infant son.

But then he and Diana confound medical convention, not to mention the rather pompous consultant (Jonathan Hyde), by resolving that he will live out his days at home.

There, with Diana as his carer, his joie de vivre comes flooding back. It becomes clear that the terrible prognosis was wrong, or at least, has been overcome. Although home-care is fraught with challenges, at a time when it was unheard of for polio victims, Robin now has a future.

Nonetheless, he will never breathe unaided which, medical wisdom dictates, means that he is destined always to be bedridden.

Then Robin has an extraordinary idea. What if a wheelchair could be converted into a respirator?

He shares this brainwave with an inventor friend, Professor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), and suddenly he is sufficiently mobile, with the devoted support of Diana and her twin brothers (both played very chirpily by Tom Hollander), they even contemplate a foreign holiday. This, it should be pointed out, was in the days when ‘disabled access’ meant removing a door frame.

At a conference in Germany, Robin issues a plea with which today we are entirely familiar, but which then sounded downright radical: that as a severely disabled person ‘I don’t want to just survive, I want to truly live’.

Paralysed he might be, yet, like U.S. civil rights leaders in the same period of history, he makes valiant, pioneering strides towards a new understanding, a new enlightenment.

And his chair goes into mass production.

I suppose Breathe protects us from some of the agonies and indignities of extensive paralysis. And there will doubtless be some ungenerous beings who point out that even in his stricken state, Robin Cavendish still existed in a bubble of poshness and privilege.

 

HAD HIS background been more modest, his chums less well-connected, he would have had a shorter and more wretched life. This is a world of hat-pins, striped blazers and jolly fancy-dress shindigs, and Serkis revels in it.

But then it’s the truth of this remarkable story that makes it so intensely affecting, combined with the perfection of both lead performances.

Garfield and Foy have both done plenty of fine work in the past, but none of it better than this. The steady love but evolving relationship between Robin and Diana seems utterly real.

I hope those responsible for handing out acting awards don’t mind being reminded how much they seem to adore portrayals of extreme disability by able-bodied actors.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Eddie Redmayne, for example, already have Oscars to show for it. Andrew Garfield was nominated for one Academy Award for Best Actor in 2017 but didn’t win the award. Surely, his time will come.

 

Breathe (12A)

Verdict: Searingly moving

★★★★★