‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ Review: A Moving and Soulful Dramedy
While James Griffiths’ The Ballad of Wallis Island does not reinvent the wheel, it illustrates a moving portrait of grief with three devastating performances at the core of the movie.
We’ve already had a fairly layered and affecting portrait of grief released in cinemas (in the United Kingdom) and on streaming (in North America) this year with Michael Morris’ Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Any movie tackling the subject again would feel like a lesser title in comparison. Yet, singular auteurs are directly confronting us with the spectre of death in Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Woman in the Yard and David Cronenberg’s exceptional The Shrouds, each bringing a different perspective to the biggest of all uncertainties. In James Griffiths’ simply executed The Ballad of Wallis Island, the movie’s portrait of the subject is distinct enough to stand on its own, especially where it matters most, ultimately tugging your heartstrings in the most unexpected of ways.
The story itself doesn’t reinvent the wheel, as it tracks a reunion between singers Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) and Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) of the folk band McGwyer Mortimer, a popular English duo that, we hear, charted in the 2000s and early 2010s, before abruptly splitting. Screenwriters Tom Basden and Tim Key introduce us to the band through a bevy of fictitious songs written for the movie, each deeply moving and musically cogent than the last. We begin the movie with Herb arriving in the remote Wallis Island by boat, to perform a gig at the request of Charles (Tim Key), a lifelong admirer of his and Nell’s music.
One may say Charles is a die-hard fan of the band, perhaps too die-hard. He’s utterly obsessed with everything and anything related to them, which makes his exchanges with Herb feel strangely awkward and full of unwanted tension. Soon, however, the singer discovers that this entire “performance” was a ruse for Charles to reunite with both himself and Nell, who has since remarried an American man named Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen). The gig itself is also just an excuse for the two to perform in front of Charles. No one else will be able to see the show. Yet, he’s paying an exceedingly large sum of money for the duo to put on a performance, forcing them to put their past rivalry aside and rehearse before the big day.
Of course, their reunion brings about complicated feelings about themselves, which fills their rehearsals with so much friction that they are incapable of moving past them. With Michael away on a tour of the island, one thinks Herb and Nell will come back together. At least, this is what Griffiths alludes to for the majority of the runtime and even primes the audience with implicit moments that make us believe they are rekindling their romance, especially when they reminisce about the past and their most significant successes as a duo.
However, and more intelligently, Basden and Key decide to move away from familiar tropes in the movie’s middle section to progress into an ending that’s far more fulfilling for the protagonists than a chintzy, Hollywoodized conclusion otherwise might have been. It instead decides to give their characters a moral challenge once a pivotal turn reveals what Charles’ true intentions for their reunion are. The one thing I will say is that it is not at all what you expect, even if the host’s overzealous behaviour and constant barrage of puns (such as “you’re Dame Judi Drenched,” or “let me fire up the Condoleezza Rice”) makes him particularly grating for Herb, who was expecting way more than what he signed up for.
There’s a reason why he’s like that, and when the film eventually tells us why that is, one can’t entirely shun The Ballad of Wallis Island from being a conventional and straightforward dramedy, especially when it directly tackles the character’s unprocessed grief. It certainly treads in familiar waters for some time, especially when Nell and Herb reunite, which are arguably the film’s weaker parts. Basden and Mulligan’s chemistry works wonders, but their relationship is perhaps too telegraphed for us to fully be invested in it, even if we know Nell isn’t being entirely honest with Herb on her reason for wanting to play for Charles and reminisce on the past.
It’s only when the movie reaches a twist point that their relationship becomes more meaningful, because Herb finally realizes what he has been missing all along by attempting to cling to the past instead of “growing up.”. From there, the movie can work its magic and leave you in a puddle of tears, not only comforted by G. Magni Ágústsson’s impeccably lush visuals of Wallis Island that envelop your senses, but renewed, as you’ll be keen to examine life in a different way than you might have before, especially when reckoning with the finite time you have on this planet.
Sometimes, that’s all we need in a movie. It may not have the most original screenplay in the world. It may be often predictable, especially in its opening sections, that this is the most paint-by-numbers movie of the year. However, when it opens itself up and moves away from tropes that could’ve made it forgettable, The Ballad of Wallis Island suddenly becomes a smartly constructed motion picture, one that’s worthy of the crowd-pleasing praise it has been getting and will likely find a new life once the (few) people who have seen it speak of its power and encourage audiences to seek it out. My showing was sadly empty, but this is a film that’s destined to endure, because the strong emotions one will feel after the lights come back on are so powerful that your memory will be unable to wipe them off, acting both as a balm for the heart and a reminder that grief, no matter how it may bring the most complicated feelings, is a natural part of our lives that we must all find a way to cope with.
It may not be easy, but if it brings us closer to living in the now before it’s taken all away, perhaps it’s all that matters…