From Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’avventura” to even Angelina Jolie’s “By the Sea,” movies in which couples in crisis wander new terrain while also feeling like tourists in their own lives, welcome “Midwinter Break” to the club. In fact, in terms of the overall lugubriousness of Stella (Lesley Manville) and Gerry’s (Ciarán Hinds) impromptu vacation to the sheer dour vibes of the chilly, gray Amsterdam weather, director Polly Findlay’s new film seems to say, “Hold my Guinness.”
Though Manville and Hinds are incapable of performances that are anything less than fantastic, “Midwinter Break” serves up just about the most depressing holiday imaginable — and in a moviegoing season in which we are all already reeling from the most depressing winter ever. As for this “Midwinter Break”? More like “The Winter of Our Lives.” The script here is too stiffly restrained to a fault to make much of an emotional impact, even as spending time with these actors historically is never without pleasures.
Stella and Gerry are a long-ago empty-nested couple living in County Derry in a cozy village one would describe as being “nestled” in a nook somewhere in Ireland. Their lives, it appears, have sunken to the nadir of mundanity in retirement, with Gerry deep in his cups, boozing with a grim resolve, and Stella also not not about to bring out the wine a little too early in the day. She’s also a piously devout Catholic who has given the biggest slice of her personality pie over to God; at a certain point, you are all but expecting her to pull out a whip and start repenting.
It all has something to do with a vaguely foreshadowed accident she was involved in in Troubles-era Belfast several decades ago, while heavily pregnant — a cold infusion of snippets of which are administered like an IV drip throughout the movie. The type of memory flashbacks that are shot at knee level, gauzy and out of focus, with a gossamer visual touch to conjure whispering, buried emotions of the past.
Gerry, meanwhile, is about as patriotically Irish as Stella is Catholic — not just in the sense of his hard-drinking, but also with former glories of youth he’s keen to share with any unsuspecting bartender who is forced to listen. He’s the type of alcoholic who will take a sizable swig off a bottle in the few seconds here and there where his wife is in the next room. Stella knows she’s codependent and complicit — and thus, to break the spell of another lonely Christmas (their son has opted only to phone in for the holiday) followed by another cold, lonely New Year’s, Stella surprises Gerry with tickets to Amsterdam. Obviously, it’s been some time since they’ve experienced anything adjacent to an adventure. He’s instantly buoyed by the proposal, which at least eliminates “Midwinter Break” from being a movie where he’s dragged abroad against his will.
Despite Gerry managing to score a bottle of whiskey somewhere, offscreen, in customs, his joie de vivre is not immediately refreshed upon arrival in Amsterdam, and neither is Stella’s. It soon becomes clear that Stella may have brought Gerry there under false pretenses — whether premeditated or not — because she ends up fixating on a convent, hoping to join the local sisterhood, which would, of course, mean leaving Gerry and his liquor and his statins behind. The rhythms of Gerry’s drinking problem start to get repetitive, but, alas, c’est la vie when it comes to the spinning wheel of addiction.
Despite the narrowness their visit’s purpose acquires, “Midwinter Break” does make generous use of the city’s locations, whether walking along the canals or through the De Pijp neighborhood shops or visiting the Rijksmuseum to awe at the Rembrandts. And the movie certainly looks picture-pleasant enough, as shot on location by recurring Ben Wheatley cinematographer Laurie Rose. There’s also the added element of the film’s leading actors, who both give expectedly committed turns in their roles — though one issue here is that the film’s primarily target snowbirds-and-up audience doesn’t necessarily turn out in theaters for adult-minded dramas (or anything at all) these days. “Midwinter Break” gets a lovely scene where we see septuagenarians (or one of them, anyway) sharing a moment of actual physical intimacy. But Stella and Gerry never seem to actually enjoy a minute of this “vacation,” their joylessness ultimately infecting the audience.
Manville, who is the most interesting thing about every movie she’s ever played in, delivers an emotionally charged speech in which she explains why she has displaced all her life’s unhappiness into dreams of the sisterhood, and onto God. Her Stella is maddeningly, frustratingly pious, especially when contrasted against her husband’s secularity, until she finally opens up. It’s certainly one of Manville’s best performances since playing the surrogate mother to a dressmaking control freak in “Phantom Thread” or a hapless, drifting alcoholic in “Another Year” made the long-working British actress something of an item here in the States. But god, if the revelations that come out of Stella’s overdue psychic purge don’t make you want to catch the next plane out of Schiphol to get to anywhere but depressing here, I don’t know what will.
Grade: C
“Midwinter Break” opens in theaters on Friday, February 20, from Focus Features.
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