Film Review: The Salt Path. The Taunton Odeon.
Cold and wet, hot and sunny, the restless sea and the vast sky above. The Salt Path is a love letter to the coastal path that winds around every headland and cove, every beach and every rocky outcrop in the Southwest. As a film adaptation of Raynor Winn’s memoir of her walk around the coast with her husband Moth it captures the mood of the odyssey rather than the detail with the elements and landscape and nature extra characters through the cinematography of Helene Louvart.
Directed by Marianne Elliott and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz The Salt Path is a touching, emotional and loving portrayal of Moth and Raynor as they struggle to come to terms with becoming homeless with the 630 mile walk as their therapy. It begins with their tent almost getting washed away when they pitch it too close to the high tide mark – a sort of metaphor for their predicament. Their backstory is filled in with flashbacks – the lost farm, their teenage children, Moth’s diagnosis with corticobasal degeneration disease and a mercenary friend who offers them work and a shed to live in.
Anyone who has gone camping, walked along the cliff tops and beaches of Devon and Cornwall, got soaked and found refuge in a pub with a fire, sat on a park bench and ate soggy chips as though they were only food in the world will identify with the movie. It’s a cinematic celebration of wet anoraks, blistered feet and the vagaries of the British weather. Gillian Anderson as Raynor with her tangled salt stained hair and variety of concerned expressions and somewhere in the Midlands accent gives a beautifully sympathetic portrayal of the protagonist while Jason Isaacs with his limp and pain induced grunts and groans is the perfect partner despite looking remarkably well for someone on death’s door.
Which brings me to the controversy about the nature of the ‘true story.’ The movie does state in the long list of credits at the end that the film that it is a fictionalised version of the 2018 memoir and travel book. Although the main issue has been about how they became homeless which was exposed in a piece by Chloe Hadjimatheou in The Sunday Observer which set out a number of allegations. The alleged theft by Raynor Winn (real name Sally Walker) of cash from her employer estate agent, the loan from a relative of Moth (real name Tim Walker) to pay it back with their farmhouse as security for the £100,000 repayment scheme – then repossessed when she failed to keep up the payments, and their house in France which also wasn’t mentioned in the book. Then there was the question of Moth’s terminal illness and even whether they had actually completed the walk.
Since the allegations were made there has been what has become known as a ‘pile on.’ People who have never read the book, read Chloe Hadjimatheou’s article or seen the film slammed Raynor and Moth’s account without knowing much about it other than what they gleaned from social media. In fairness to Raynor Winn she has since produced documents that showed Moth’s initial diagnosis was as stated but likely to be “an even more unusual disorder, perhaps monogenetic”. She also refuted other aspects of the Hadjimatheou article and said anyone she had owed money to had all been paid eventually.
I enjoyed the book mainly because I live in the west country, go camping and know many of the places described by Raynor – and it’s an excellent read. It’s not a best seller for nothing with its mix of middle-aged middle-class people in a financial and health crisis – plus the beauty of the English coast – and a story of a couple’s new found love and the redemption on a 630 mile hike. The couple’s strong relationship in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, who support each other through thick and thin through rain and wind.
My only grouch in the book – is my hometown of Seaton barely got a mention – but at least they did walk along its mile long beach. The one aspect of the film I found initially puzzling at first was nowhere appeared to be positively identified. There’s a shot of them in Clovelly, one in St Ives and as they leave Minehead behind you can see Butlins in the far distance. Locations were mainly in the form of places like The Valley of the Rocks, and where Exmoor runs down to the cliff edge. The landscape and seascape are the third character – with the people they meet as a supporting cast who reinforce aspects of their life – some rude and hostile, some kind and helpful and even one girl who they help to take the bus to stay with her grannie and away we hope from an abusive partner.
Harry Mottram
Steven McIntosh of the BBC wrote an article about the allegations at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c89eq12qvl5o
A link to The Observer’s article: https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-real-salt-path-how-the-couple-behind-a-bestseller-left-a-trail-of-debt-and-deceit
Rapscallion Magazine is an occasional online publication edited by Harry Mottram for his own interest.
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