Breathe review – a triumph of joy over adversity

Andy Serkis’s directorial debut about the life of pioneering polio survivor Robin Cavendish is heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure

Joy is a complicated emotion to capture on screen – particularly when your narrative deals with paralysis, imprisonment and a desire for death. Yet Andy Serkis’s directorial feature debut, about the life of pioneering polio survivor Robin Cavendish, is so full of laughter that one might easily forget its sombre subject matter. Part exuberant love story, part great escape adventure, this is an old-fashioned tale of triumph over adversity that refuses – like its protagonists – to succumb to confinement. Comparisons with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Theory of Everything are perhaps inevitable, but I was reminded more of the warmth and wit of the lovely 2014 Edwyn Collins documentary The Possibilities Are Endless. I honestly can’t remember the last time I laughed and cried so much at the same movie.

We first meet Robin (Andrew Garfield) in a late-50s whirlwind of cricket and tennis, tea and travel, sweeping his new bride Diana (Claire Foy) off to Kenya where she announces that they are to be parents. The world is their oyster – until polio strikes and Robin is paralysed from the neck down, kept alive by a respirator. “We’re talking a couple of months,” Diana is told, while Robin demands: “Let me die”. Instead, Diana resolves to remove her husband from hospital (“You’ll be dead in two weeks!” insists a doctor) and take him home. Family and friends rally round, including eccentric professor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), who develops a Heath Robinson-style contraption combining a wheelchair with a respirator. Utilising a bicycle chain and a set of Sturmey-Archer gears, the device reignites Robin’s wanderlust, challenging the restrictive expectations placed on his condition by medicine – and by society at large.

Having played polio survivor Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Serkis brings compassion and empathy to the drama

Continue reading... October 29, 2017 at 02:30PM